AGAINST THE RED TIDE: RENA M. VALE AND THE LONG RED SCARE IN
CALIFORNIA
Christopher Robert Deutsch
B.A., California State University, Sacramento, 2006
THESIS
Submitted in partial satisfaction of
the requirements for the degree of
MASTER OF ARTS
in
HISTORY
at
CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY, SACRAMENTO
FALL
2010
© 2010
Christopher Robert Deutsch
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
ii
AGAINST THE RED TIDE: RENA M. VALE AND THE LONG RED SCARE IN
CALIFORNIA
A Thesis
by
Christopher Robert Deutsch
Approved by:
__________________________________, Committee Chair
Joseph Pitti, PhD
__________________________________, Second Reader
Joseph Palermo, PhD
____________________________
Date
iii
Student: Christopher Robert Deutsch
I certify that this student has met the requirements for format contained in the University format
manual, and that this thesis is suitable for shelving in the Library and credit is to be awarded for
the thesis.
__________________________, Graduate Coordinator
Mona Siegel, PhD
Department of History
iv
___________________
Date
Abstract of
AGAINST THE RED TIDE: RENA M. VALE AND THE LONG RED SCARE IN
CALIFORNIA
by
Christopher Robert Deutsch
This thesis offers an analysis of the life of Rena Marie Vale (1898-1983), a professional
anticommunist crusader who likely shaped the agenda if not the personality of the California Un-American
Activities Committee (CUAC) in the 1960s. Topics explored herein include anticommunism through the
lens of gender; the role of professional women in the anticommunist jihad; the use of science fiction to
expose the mortal danger of communism to America; and the response of CUAC to those who defied the
House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC), the anti-war peaceniks, the proponents of the Civil
Rights Crusade, and the advocates of the Free Speech Movement.
A number of historians have addressed women as targets of anticommunist inquisitions, but few
have ever mentioned those women who operated as the inquisitors themselves. Though generally unknown
to scholars, Vale toiled behind the curtain as a Red hunter deluxe, framing the questions for the
investigative committee as well as supplying the inculpatory evidence needed to indict individuals
summoned to prove their Americanism. For instance, as the committee’s main conduit of information on
the seismic events occurring in California in the 1960s, she likely influenced the views of Hugh Burns and
Richard Coombs by giving them the fodder to brand the Free Speech Movement a communist plot.
This thesis draws primarily from the Records of the California Un-American Activities Committee
housed at the California State Archives, particularly the valuable Index Card File dating from 1954 to 1968;
the Bay Area Reports and the Office Files, which explain why Vale created the aforementioned cards; and
Vale’s own testimony before CUAC and HUAC. Insight into Vale’s mindset can best be gleaned from her
memoir and her three science fiction novels. Other primary sources that undergird my essay include
interviews, newspaper reports, and correspondence. Finally, secondary accounts have also informed my
analysis; specifically, I have especially relied on the works of Edward Barrett, Jr., David Caute, John
Haynes, Michael Heale, Richard Hofstadter, Lisa McGirr, Kathryn Olmsted, William Rorabaugh, Catherine
Rymph, Ingrid Scobie, Ellen Shrecker, and Kate Weigand.
The thesis concludes that Vale not only experienced professional success as a diligent pursuer of
communists, but likely her vital role as a female Torquemada conferred enormous personal satisfaction
after having been spurned by chauvinistic males in the studio system and even in the Communist Party. It
also recognizes the success of Vale’s futuristic fiction both as an exemplar of Cold War hysteria and for her
Cassandra-like efforts to fan chimerical fears of thermonuclear war and the Soviet subjugation of the
United States.
_______________________, Committee Chair
Joseph Pitti, PhD
_______________________
Date
v
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I could not have finished this paper without the help of countless conspirators. I would
first like to thank the archivists of the California State Archives, especially Jeff Crawford;
all were there from the beginning, helping this project that eventually consumed my life.
They guided me through the California Un-American Activities Committee records,
pointing out possible leads, and joining me as I pieced together the story behind the
documents.
Secondly, I would like to thank my fellow students, past and present. They
tolerated me as I blathered about my new discoveries and ideas, which usually morphed
into impromptu lectures about California history. Nevertheless, they offered up ideas or
corrected my errors of judgment all the while enduring their own concerns and deadlines.
We shared the difficulties facing graduate students in these times; an experience that will
stay with me for the rest of my life.
Thirdly, I thank my professors. They all tried their hardest to make me the student
I am and the scholar I am becoming. Two of them even tasked their sanity by overseeing
this project. Professor Joseph Palermo taught me passion. He never passed up a chance to
share his excitement over a multitude of topics—historical or otherwise. I hope this work
reflects that same enthusiasm
And to Professor Joseph Pitti, how does one repay an incalculable debt owed to
someone so willing to sacrifice so much for his students? All I can say is simply that I
would not be half the student I am and this thesis would not be half the paper it is without
your stern sagacity.
The person I owe the most to is my wife. Thank you for your love, support, and,
all too often it seemed, forgiveness. I could not have completed this without you.
All of the mistakes are mine and all of the successes are theirs.
vi
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
Acknowledgments.................................................................................................................... vi
Chapter
1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................................. 1
2. RENA VALE AND COMMUNISM .................................................................................. 6
3. SOUNDING THE TOCSIN: VALE’S WRITINGS ......................................................... 45
4. THE BAY AREA INDEX ................................................................................................ 76
5. CONCLUSION ............................................................................................................... 140
Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 144
vii
1
Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION
On February 26, 1983, the Associated Press ran an obituary for an 85-year-old
“author and motion picture screenwriter.”1 The obituary listed her accomplishments as
writing four novels and working as an investigator for Representative Martin Dies’ House
Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in the thirties and for Senator Joseph
McCarthy’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in the forties.2 But Rena Marie
Vale certainly was more than a novelist and, while she did work for un-American
investigation committees in Washington, she actually spent far more time as an antisubversion investigator for the state of California. Moreover, Senator McCarthy did not
head the Investigations subcommittee until he became chair of the Government
Operations Committee in 1953, and Rena Vale never worked for him.3 In addition, her
oeuvre actually included five novels, one memoir, two plays, and numerous Hollywood
screenplays. Who was this woman the Associated Press felt deserved an obituary but then
declined to ensure the accuracy of its account?
Born in Yavapai County, Arizona on January 30, 1898, Rena Vale died in
Tucson, Arizona, February 25, 1983, and lived an interesting life.4 Her writings reveal a
1
Obituary of Rena Vale, Los Angeles Times, February 26, 1983.
2
Ibid.
3
Richard Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), 134.
“Rena Vale,” Social Security Death Index, http://search.ancestrylibrary.com/cgibin/sse.dll?rank=1&gsfn=rena+marie&gsln=vale&gsby... (accessed July 3, 2009).
4
2
woman of energy and verve, and someone who held fierce convictions. By her own
admission, she grew up as a cowgirl, graduated from a normal school in Flagstaff
(Northern Arizona) and taught school kids, sold men’s hosiery, worked as a scenario
writer for Paramount and Universal Studios in Hollywood, toiled as a stenographer, and
joined the Communist Party.5 Following her brief stint in the Communist Party, she
morphed into an ardent anticommunist around the time she turned forty.6 Then, in “one
of the coldest [winters] in the Midwest in many years,” she left California in 1943 for
Illinois, where she lived until 1961 or 1962,7 publishing two books while living there. In
the early 1960s, she relocated to the California Bay Area and worked for the California
Senate Fact-Finding Sub-Committee on Un-American Activities (CUAC) until the
summer of 1969.8 During this employment, she published one book. At the age of 72, she
returned to Illinois and wrote three more books.9 Sometime between 1972 and 1983, she
settled in Tucson, where she passed away.
Rena M. Vale, “Affidavit,” in Joint Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in
California, [First Report] Report [of the] Joint Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in
California, 55th session, 1943, 122-23 (hereafter cited as Report of the Un-American Activities Committee,
1943); “Winner in National Film Idea Contest; Wealth for Local Woman,” Los Angeles Times, March 14,
1928.
5
6
Rena M. Vale Against the Red Tide (Los Angeles; Standard Publications, 1953), 62.
7
Ibid., 87.
8
Richard E. Combs to Betty Nielson, memorandum, February 6, 1962, file 67/1, Records of the
California Senate Fact-Finding Sub-Committee on Un-American Activities, California State Archives,
Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento (hereafter cited as Records of CUAC); Rena M. Vale to Mary
Albright, June 14, 1969, Box 69, “expense” file, Records of CUAC. Combs jokingly signed the
memorandum with “Proletarian greetings, Josip Vissarionovich Dgughashvili,” Joseph Stalin’s Georgian
name.
9
Rena M. Vale to Mary Albright, June 14, 1969, Box 69, “expense” file, Records of CUAC.
3
This is a study exploring Vale’s anticommunist beliefs, her work for the
California Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee of Un-American Activities (CUAC), and
her general views about the turbulent sixties. She certainly distinguished herself as
perhaps the premier “Red huntress” in the country. Unlike many of her male colleagues,
Rena never dismissed a woman’s political agency; instead she saw women as fully
formed decision-makers, masters of their own destiny. Her background also made her
notable. As both an ex-Communist and an anticommunist, she contributed a unique
perspective to the committee, earning her high accolades from both Senator Hugh Burns
and Chief Investigator Richard E. Combs.10 During the last half of her life—and long
after McCarthy fell into infamy—she retained her deep hatred of all things communist
and persisted in finding an insidious “Red” conspiracy behind the social turmoil across
the United States, especially in the Bay Area. Rena’s work thus provides an important
insight into the evolution of anticommunism from the little Red Scare of 1939 through
the Cold War’s Second Red Scare and into the 1960s. Although she accused many
individuals of Communist Party membership, this essay will not seek to prove the merits
of her claims.
This paper consists of three parts. The first chapter has two main sections. The
first discusses the historiography of anticommunism, gender, and the growth of the New
Right. The second section explores Rena’s choice to join and later abandon the
Communist Party. The second chapter relates the themes within her fiction to her
10
CUAC.
Richard E. Combs to Betty Nielson, memorandum, February 6, 1962, file 67/1, Records of
4
anticommunism. The last chapter is also divided into two sections. The first section
describes the history of CUAC and her place within it. The second section offers a case
study of some of the indices she created between 1962 and 1965, including files on Frank
Wilkinson, the Berkeley Peace Center, the Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial
Discrimination, and the Free Speech Movement. Each chapter contains lengthy
quotations from Rena’s work. As a professional writer, she developed a singular writing
style. By quoting her frequently, the author hopes to illustrate and preserve her inimitable
style for the reader.
Because Vale and other anticommunists had a tendency to capitalize
“communism” and “socialism,” regardless of whether they were specifically discussing
the Party or generally discussing communism as a theory, a few comments about
terminology are perhaps in order. In this paper, the words “communism,” “Marxism,”
and “socialism” appear frequently. The word “communism” will be capitalized when
used to describe matters relating to the actual Communist Party, whether in the United
States of America (known formally as the Communist Party of the United States of
America, or with the initialism CPUSA) or to anyone affiliated with any other national
Communist Party. Many variations of the word also appear and they follow the same
basic guidelines. “Marxism” and various “-isms” attached to proper names always appear
in capital letters while “socialism” follows standard grammar rules. In all cases,
quotations follow the original usage.
The California investigative committee on un-American activities had several
names. It started as the Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities, but the
5
Assembly withdrew and it became the Senate Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American
Activities. In 1959, its name officially changed to the Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee
on Un-American Activities, after the Senate subsumed the committee under the Senate
General Research Committee. Over the years, some knew it also as the “Little Dies
Committee,” the Tenney Committee after Senator Jack Tenney, and the Burns Committee
after Senator Hugh Burns. In this paper, the acronym “CUAC” will serve to note all
incarnations of the committee, as this follows the familiar form of the House Committee
on Un-American Activities (HUAC).
6
Chapter 2
RENA VALE AND COMMUNISM
Historiography
Anticommunism does not belong to any specific ideology or belief structure. Both
liberals and conservatives have condemned communism in the most absolute terms. Yet,
the advent of McCarthyism in 1950 inextricably linked conservatism and anticommunism
forever. Historians, seeking to explain this phenomenon, have continually grappled with
placing Senator McCarthy’s specific brand of anticommunism within a larger historical
context. McCarthyism, they note, represented conservative anticommunism that above all
emphasized public exposure of suspected communists.11
Historian Richard Hofstadter authored perhaps the most prominent early work on
conservative anticommunism in the post-war period. Hofstadter, in an essay titled “The
Paranoid Style of American Politics,” viewed right-wing dissidents as a group suffering
from a form of “political psychosis” and as enactors of the populist political tradition.12
Hofstadter, in 1964, noted that they rejected elitism and intellectualism and zealously
embraced a belief in the sinister forces of a “hostile and conspiratorial world… [that
were] directed against a nation, a culture, a way of life whose fate affects not [merely the
11
Fried, 9.
M. J. Heale, McCarthy’s America (Athens: University of George Press, 1998), 279. Richard
Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” from Richard Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of
American Politics and Other Essays (1965; repr., Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 8.
Hofstadter’s essay first appeared in Harper’s in 1964.
12
7
paranoic alone] but millions of others.”13 Hofstadter, who identified McCarthyism as the
most recent popular manifestation of this embattled belief, predicated his analysis on his
conception of America as a “consensus nation,” or as one historian described it: a nation
practicing “consensual pluralism.”14 Put crudely, most citizens agreed most of the time
on most issues. Presumably, only those with a deep-seated dissatisfaction with modern
life—a distinct minority to be sure—could agree with conservative anticommunist values
and find so much wrong with the nation. For many years, the Columbia University
historian’s psychological explanation of the anticommunist conservatives strongly
resonated with his peers across the country.
Later historians, however, have challenged Hofstadter’s belief in a strictly
psychological explanation of McCarthyism. According to the historian M. J. Heale,
“Other scholars too have subordinated McCarthy himself to larger and fairly
conventional political processes”15 and, by doing so, have underscored the popularity of
anticommunism across the political spectrum. In The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist
Purge Under Truman and Eisenhower, the historian David Caute explored the political
attitudes that initiated and supported the post-War Red Scare. He found that Washington
inaugurated a purge of communists in the federal government prior to the advent of what
was called McCarthyism. By using the term “purge,” Caute connected the United States’
13
Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” 4.
Thomas Bender, “Intellectual and Cultural History,” in The New American History, rev. ed., ed.
Eric Foner (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997), 186.
14
Heale, McCarthy’s America, 279. Scholars have likewise challenged Hofstadter’s conception of
1890s populism in a similar way, especially his classification of populists as schizophrenic. See Charles
Postel, The Populist Vision (New York City: Oxford University Press, 2007), 6.
15
8
cleansing efforts to the malevolent and murderous campaigns to wipe out political
dissenters in the Soviet Union under Stalin, though he concedes that while “blood
flowed” in the USSR, “mainly tears” flowed in America.16 Although the purges were not
generally deadly in the United States, they not only limited freedom but elicited “storms
of indignation” among those who believed government had violated America’s
“traditions, ideals, and rhetoric.”17 Nonetheless, Caute points out that this betrayal of
sacrosanct political principles briefly enjoyed strong popular appeal. Still other historians
moved away from focusing on popular fears and the politicians that pandered to these
anxieties to the study of institutional sources of anticommunism, such as the Federal
Bureau of Investigations.
The form of anticommunism popularly called McCarthyism, according to the
historian Ellen Schrecker, might well have been called “Hooverism.”18 She described the
FBI under J. Edgar Hoover as the “bureaucratic heart of the McCarthy era,” as well as
crucially significant in establishing the character of the second Red Scare.19 In Many Are
the Crimes: McCarthyism in America, she not only traces the FBI’s role in the anticommunist crusade from the conservative 1920s, when the Party appeared nearly defunct,
to its remarkable recovery in the New Deal and Popular Front era, but she also explores
16
David Caute, The Great Fear: The Anti-Communist Purges Under Truman and Eisenhower
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978), 17.
17
Ibid., 18.
18
Ellen Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press, 1998), 203.
19
Ibid.
9
Hoover’s attitudes and beliefs regarding communism. According to Schrecker, the
resilience of the Party convinced Hoover that Americans should never take comfort from
its apparent weakness. For the FBI Director, she writes, “The party’s obvious decline by
the late 1950s could thus be equally transitory and might, in fact, be cause for alarm.”20
Hoover, she adds, would remain convinced, as would many other anticommunists, that
the Communist Party was so monolithic as to have an immutable and universal nature.
This included the ability to turn a rebuke, or even defeat, into a situation advancing the
Party’s agenda. Hoover’s conception of the Party filtered through the body politic after he
assumed control of the FBI in 1924.
Historian M. J. Heale conducted a state-by-state study of anticommunist politics.
He found that state and local governments unrepentantly employed red scare politics as a
cleansing tool as much as the federal government. Additionally, he argues that
anticommunist politics did not follow a prescriptive path set forth by Washington elites.
Each state witnessed its own version of McCarthyism. Some states, like Massachusetts,
pioneered red scare politics, anticipating the federal government’s responses.21 The Red
Scare unfolded along a unique path that intersected national trends while remaining
within the purview of the local politicians, created by each state’s unique culture. One
major ingredient to creating a red scare throughout the country was a heterogeneous
20
Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes, 144.
21
Heale, McCarthy’s America, 150.
10
political culture.22 California’s grew massively during the decade leading up to the small
Red Scare of the late 1930s, as it did during the post-war boom of the early Cold War.
Lisa McGirr, in Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right,
explored the values of politically active conservatives in Orange County, California. She
complained about Hofstadter and his disciples by writing that, “While they correctly
argued for paying attention to the ordinary people who populated the ranks of the right,
their excessively psychological interpretation distorted our understanding of American
conservatism.”23 She found that Orange County served as both a major recipient of
federal aid and as the ground zero of modern, affluent suburbia. Yet, many of its residents
felt disquieted at the new cultural environment, particularly a suburban arrangement that
deadened spirituality and challenged conventional Christian morality.24 Further, and
without irony, they were increasingly critical of government money used to alleviate
poverty and social ills.
McGirr argued that anticommunism included “a host of concerns—concerns
about the state’s regulation of the economy and national life, changing cultural mores,
and racial egalitarianism.”25 In the 1990s, Conservative activist Cathy Sillivan agreed,
writing, “anticommunism meant a lot of things. It didn’t just mean, ‘Let’s go kill
22
Heale, McCarthy’s America, 151.
23
Lisa McGirr, Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right (Princeton, NY:
Princeton University Press, 2001), 7.
24
Ibid., 8-9.
25
Ibid., 176.
11
Russians.’ That had nothing to do with it.”26 McGirr’s social history relates how
suburbanites in the Cold War turned away from liberalism and embraced conservatism
under the rubric of anticommunism. Voters across the country would soon find common
cause with the anticommunists.
Historians continue to debate the merits of anticommunism, searching to validate
or repudiate the need for the purges and the subsequent anti-radicalism that spread
through the nation. Did anticommunists harm more than help? Not surprisingly, two
distinct sides characterize the controversy. One side, which includes the historians
Maurice Isserman, Ellen Shrecker, and Richard M. Fried, roundly condemns the
anticommunist movement for fanning undemocratic hysteria. 27 The other side, to the
contrary, exonerates or praises the anticommunist jihad and claims the historians Harvey
Klehr, John E. Haynes, and Richard Gid Powers in its camp.28 If the former school has
26
Quoted in McGirr, 175-76.
27
Schrecker, Many Are the Crimes; David Caute, The Great Fear; Robert Griffith and Athan
Theoharis, eds. The Specter: Original Essays on the Cold War and the Origins of McCarthyism (New
York: New Viewpoints, 1974); Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective; Maurice
Isserman, Which Side Were You On?:The American Communist Party During the Second World War
(1982; repr., Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993); Maurice Isserman, “Open Archives and Open
Minds: ‘Traditionalists’ versus ‘Revisionists’ after Venona,” American Communist History 4, no. 2 (2005):
215-223; Dorothy Healey and Maurice Isserman, California Red: A Life in the American Communist Party
(New York City: Oxford University Press, 1993); M. J. Heale, American Anticommunism: Combating the
Enemy Within, 1830-1970 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Ellen Schrecker, No Ivory
Tower: McCarthyism and the Universities (New York City: Oxford University Press, 1986); Ellen
Schrecker The Age of McCarthyism: A Brief History With Documents, 2nd ed. (New York City: Palgrave,
2002).
28
Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York:
The Free Press, 1995); John E. Haynes, Red Scare or Red Menace?: American Communism and
Anticommunism in the Cold War Era (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Inc., 1996); John E. Haynes, “The Cold War
Debate Continues: A Traditionalist View of Historical Writing on Domestic Communism and AntiCommunism,” Journal of Cold War Studies 2, no.1 (Winter 2000): 76–115; John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr,
and Kyrill M. Anderson, The Soviet World of American Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1998); John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov, The Secret World of American
12
focused on the violation of civil liberties by Hoover and his ilk, the latter group of
scholars have concentrated on the mortal threat to the American Republic from foreign
and domestic espionage agents, directly supervised by the Kremlin. For the apologists,
the anti-communist crusade saved the nation from totalitarian rule. In mid-2009, the
debate reached an acrimonious climax with the publications of In Denial: Historians,
Communism, and Espionage, authored by Klehr and Haynes, and Cold War
Triumphalism: The Misuse of History After the Fall of Communism, edited by Shrecker.
Both books are polemics that attack those they disagree with.29 What could inspire such
uproar among usually stolid academicians?
The basic cause of this professorial rancor derived from each groups’ fundamental
assumptions regarding human nature, politics, and international relations. A critical
component of studying anticommunism is its relationship to the study of communism.
One’s view of communism also determines one’s view of anticommunism. If one begins
with the assumption that communism indeed constituted a worldwide threat, then the
anticommunist movement was justified, even if some anticommunists committed
Communism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996); John E. Haynes, and Harvey Klehr, Venona:
Decoding Soviet Espionage in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999); Harvey Klehr ed.,
The Communist Experience in America: A Political and Social History (New Brunswick, NY: Transaction
Books, 2009); John E. Haynes, Harvey Klehr, and Alexander Vassiliev, Spies: The Rise and Fall of the
KGB in America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009).
Even informal discussions remain heated between scholars. See Diane Wolfthal, “On the nature
of H-HOAC (Wolfthal),” Humanities & Social Sciences Online, http://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?
trx=vx&list=H-HOAC&month=1003&week=b&msg=8xwTNzXzRhwf3D6KDYLn4Q&user=&pw=
(accessed March 16, 2010).
29
13
excesses. 30 Conversely, if communism was not a threat to the United States, than
anticommunists merely represented the equivalent of near-do-well witch hunters or
dangerous inquisitors. Whether they sympathize with the opponents of Hoover and
McCarthy or not, historians have always had difficulty confronting what is certainly a
two-edge sword. 31 For Rena Vale, however, the inherent evil of communism never
merited debate, particularly because of the frightening imminence of a cataclysmic war
that likely would result in a communist victory unless the guardians of American security
adopted draconian measures to stem the “Red Tide.”
The political science theory of Realism, drawn particularly from the field of
international affairs, has also contributed to the debate over the anti-communist
movement in the United States. By offering an explanation for conflict among nations
that is based on “Realpolitik,” the theory allows scholars to impose a judgment on world
affairs and communism that likely reflects their own negative (jaded?) view of human
nature as well as the notion that states are naturally predatory. Championed by the
theorists Hans Morgenthau, Kenneth Waltz, and Robert Jervis, Realism “depicts
international affairs as a struggle for power among self-interested states,” and according
30
The historiography of Soviet Russia has a similar trend, with the New Left-influenced historians
in the 1960s and 1970s starting to revise previous scholarship that damned the Soviet Union. The historian
N. G. O. Pereira struck an important note when he explained that for many historians a “seamless web
connects Marx, Lenin, Stalin,” and that they would emphasize “the utopian nature of the Bolshevik project
[the Soviet Union], its arrogant social engineering, its brutal suppression of pluralism and dissent, and its
total disregard for constitutions and parliaments.” N. G. O. Pereira, “Revisiting the Revisionists and Their
Critics,” The Historian 72, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 36, 33. For these academics, anything even slightly Soviet
was doomed because the ideological experiment was only workable under a dehumanizing and monstrous
system. This view holds true for those that focus more on the sins of the CPUSA than on those of
anticommunists.
31
Haynes, “The Cold War Debate Continues,” 89-90.
14
to Stephen Walt, “is generally pessimistic about the prospects for eliminating conflict and
war.”32 In Realist theory, generally, world peace exists only through strength of arms,
internal vigilance, and the maintenance of an international balance of power.33 The Cold
War seemed to vindicate the theory. Even though the Soviet Union and the United States
continuously engaged in a deadly confrontation of low-level mobilization and internal
vigilance, only the achievement of clear supremacy by one side would end the ideological
conflict. At that point, the weaker state would either collapse without a whimper or be
destroyed in a cataclysmic war. Borrowing from Realist doctrine, the same historians
who defended the anticommunists’ defense of America viewed the Soviets as an
expansionist and deadly threat that only a strong national security state could keep in
check. At the same time, those who subscribed to Realism vehemently disdained the
civil libertarians and “peaceniks,” who viewed the world with the proverbial rose-colored
glasses and favored Panglossian policies of appeasement and surrender. Historians
favorable to anticommunism based their assertions on the notion that the world operated
as described by Realism.
Historians—namely Hofstadter—first turned to psychology to explicate the Red
Scare that followed the emerging Cold War. Their argument resonated throughout
society. Subsequent scholars, however, turned to other explanations when examining the
anticommunist hysteria and its supporters. New developments in political and social
Stephen M. Walt, “International Relations: One World, Many Theories,” in “Frontiers of
Knowledge,” special issue, Foreign Policy 110 (Spring 1998): 31.
32
33
Ibid., 32.
15
history since the 1960s have especially served to elucidate why red scares occurred and
who supported them. Individuals cleaving to anticommunism indeed may have been
paranoid, but a new generation of historians believed that only a deeper and more
nuanced study of the larger social context would enable them to truly tell the story
Gender
Gender theory allows feminist historians to challenge established historiography
by exposing the prevalence of male chauvinism in historical analysis.34 In addition to
tracing broad themes through various eras and exploring topics pertinent to women,
women’s history focuses considerably on gender power relations while highlighting those
inequalities experienced by women . Indeed, feminist historians are always compelled to
describe how women dealt with established gender roles.
No single history has yet fully explained the connection between gender and
anticommunism, specifically during the era of McCarthyism. Several historians,
however, have explored specific individuals or circumstances in this time period. One
such historian is Catherine E. Rymph. In Republican Women: Feminism and
Conservatism From Suffrage Through The Rise Of The New Right, she places Senator Joe
McCarthy’s 1950 Lincoln Day speech to the Ohio County [West Virginia] Republican
Women’s Club in a gendered context. She notes that McCarthy “seems to have
34
Joan Wallach Scott, Gender and the Politics of History, Revised Edition (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1999), 29.
16
understood his hostesses well”35 by not only hitting “on the themes of communist
subversion in the State Department, but also on communism’s threat to religion and
morality.”36 Rymph thus shows how McCarthy played on the historical association
between women and the protection of Christian morality37 at a time when the country
strongly embraced women as the selfless moral arbiters of society. Exploiting their role
as moral guardians, McCarthy expected that the crusading zeal of clubwomen would
carry over into the politics of anticommunism. According to Rymph, as anticommunist
politics reached their zenith, conservative women—like Rena Vale—became an
increasingly vital component in the movement. Their desire to vanquish godless
communism likewise led numerous women into the militant ranks of the Republican
Party.
Rymph describes the 1950s as a period of intensifying divisiveness over the
definition of Republican womanhood. One set of acceptable traits for politically active
women, according Rymph, “nurtured personal ambition,” “viewed career as a viable part
of a woman’s life,” “found it acceptable for women to be single,” and even allowed
women to express political self-interest.38 Rena Vale embodied all of these
characteristics, thereby making her a natural, if unrealized, political ally with other
35
Catherine E. Rymph, Republican Women: Feminism and Conservatism From Suffrage Through
The Rise Of The New Right (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 113.
36
Ibid.
37
Ibid., 6.
38
Ibid., 156.
17
professional women. At the same time, she neither endorsed the view that women were a
special category, nor did she at any time disparage homemakers, the other desideratum
for Republican womanhood. While she may never have become a clubwoman because
she refused to believe that women had a uniquely purifying influence on politics, her
political beliefs mirrored most of the same concerns held by conservative women of all
stripes.
In a seminal article, Kate Weigand explores the importance of gender and the way
male anticommunists perceived activities of suspected female communists. She finds that
the Ohio Un-American Activities Committee members employed a framework that
“prevented their understanding of women’s political independence, experience, and
importance in the functioning of the Communist Party.”39 Her analysis, however, was not
meant to be a general statement on anticommunism, as she situated the committee
membership’s ideas specifically in the political culture of the early 1950s.40 Nevertheless,
the Communist Party adopted a more liberal attitude towards women, and female
members of the Party would have been exposed to what could be considered feminist
ideas.41 When men investigating communism encountered politically active women,
they—despite their own beliefs—generally placed female agency within a larger political
39
Kate Weigand, “The Red Menace, the Feminine Mystique, and the Ohio Un-American
Activities Commission: Gender and Anti-Communism in Ohio, 1951-1954,” Journal of Women’s History
3, no. 3 (Winter 1992), 86. Weigand did not trace the background of the committee to see if any of the
membership had been ex-communists, former fellow travelers, or reformed New Dealers, as proved the
case with CUAC.
40
Ibid., 85.
41
Kate Weigand, Red Feminism (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 15.
18
context that was specifically anticommunist. Weigand’s singular study provides a striking
example of how gender-based assumptions sometimes prevented male anticommunists
from fully understanding communists and the so-called “fellow travelers.”
What about female anticommunists? Were they similarly influenced by the
feminine mystique? As she sought to achieve what a man could, Rena Vale no doubt felt
as frustrated by the sexism of the left in the 1930s as she was later by the chauvinism of
her fellow anticommunists. If her main work for CUAC involved writing an account of
the Communist Party in the Los Angeles area, it also called for the indexing and
organizing of the committee’s files from 1941 to 1943 and again from 1962 to 1969. The
second job obviously fell within the bounds of traditional “women’s work.” But Rena
sought to transcend her tedious and mind-numbing stenographic duties by including her
own observations on the indexes. Even though she seemed constantly to challenge the
gender line, her fiction demonstrated that she never sought to eradicate that line. Rather,
she only hoped to win recognition of the fact that women should have a political voice
because they are more than capable of engaging in activities beyond the domestic
boundaries imposed on them by traditional society.
In Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley, Kathryn Olmsted provides
another acutely insightful look into how women and anticommunism interacted by
tracing the career of a Communist spy turned informant. Elizabeth Bentley experienced a
very different Communism than Rena Vale, becoming prominent nationally only when
19
she revealed the details of a Soviet spy ring in Washington, D.C.42 The “Spy Queen’s”
testimony confirmed the guilt of many spies, including Alger Hiss. Indeed, she supplied
evidence that supported Whitaker Chambers’ accusations against Hiss, and she became
the star witness of Congress’ inquiries into communist espionage.43 Yet Bentley’s gender
affected her life. Olmstead notes that Bentley “realized, with mounting anger, that her
gender prevented her from achieving the success of her fellow ex-Communists who
happened to be men.”44 If Bentley responded to the egregious slight by drinking harder,
Vale simply determined to work that much harder at ferreting out Communists.
Vale and Bentley were ordinary women who never surrendered to society’s
traditional gender expectations. Olmstead writes, “The real Elizabeth Bentley had been a
strong woman who defied limits, laws, and traditions.”45 Both Bentley and Rena Vale
offered separate testimonies that convinced legislative bodies that Communism
threatened the nation. Courageously, each named a number of “fellow travelers,” “pinks,”
and “Reds.” Their allegations and affidavits shocked lawmakers with descriptions of how
infested the country had become with “Reds.” Despite their vital contributions, however,
both women aroused widespread skepticism to their claims of being reformed ex-radicals
42
Kathryn Olmsted, Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley (Chapel Hill: The
University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 157.
43
Ibid., 100-01, 138-39.
44
Ibid., 204.
45
Ibid.
20
and serious anticommunists. Both women constantly battled against gender stereotypes
that pervaded the anti-communist movement.
Vale related an incident that not only showed the two women knew each other
and that Bentley had been Rena’s houseguest, but that they shared a keen sensitivity to
gender-based political issues. Vale recalled that in the course of talking to “housewives
and club women” about the organizing problems facing the Illinois chapter of the Parent
Teachers Association in 1948 or 1949,46 “One of the innocents mentioned a strange
phrase used by a trouble maker—‘I’ll have you brought up on charges!’” Instantly, Rena
remembered, “Both Miss Bentley and I burst out laughing much to the surprise of the
other women. They didn’t know that the phrase practically identified their suspect as a
Communist.”47 Bentley and Vale mobilized other women to create anti-communist
groups outside of the household while remaining firmly within a woman’s domestic
sphere. At the same time, the two women seemingly used their insider knowledge of the
CPUSA to keep such groups free of subversives.
Whereas Elizabeth Bentley captured the attention of an entire nation, Rena Vale’s
California exploits received scant attention. While Bentley spied for over a decade, Vale
never passed information on to Soviet handlers.48 Vale admitted that her “experiences
46
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 51-52.
47
Ibid., 52.
48
Ibid., 7-8. Vale was directly inspired by the memoirs and testimonials of ex-Communists such
as Elizabeth Bentley’s Out of Bondage.
21
within the Communist Party were limited and unsensational [sic].”49 She wrote reports
and helped research topics but never handled information considered sensitive to the
national security interests of the United States. This coincidentally would foreshadow her
anticommunist work. Yet, her lack of direct espionage experience did not diminish
Rena’s struggle to expose foreign agents acting against the best interests of her country.
Because her professional career spanned nearly the entire twentieth century,
Vale’s life as both a Communist and an anticommunist highlighted the struggles women
endured during that time period. Rena’s vigor and curiosity exudes from her work. Her
broad interests and ample imagination especially helped her break free of any constraints
she may have felt because of her gender. Her written work reveals much about both her
intellectual orientation and her mental state.
In and Out of the Communist Party
Before joining the Communist Party, Rena experienced a few professional
triumphs. In 1928, for instance, she won the Paramount-Famous Players Lasky $15,000
Idea screenplay contest,50 earning first place out of around 40,000 submissions. She won
her share, $5,000, and the chance for her film script to be made into a movie.51 Titled
“Swag,” her screenplay received praise from newspapers, which described her work as
49
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 7.
50
“Wealth for Local Woman,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1928.
51
Dave Keene, Oakland Tribune, March 25, 1928.
22
“unusually good.”52 Although the studio never made the movie, her experience with the
contest led to her working as a “scenario writer” for a brief period. Despite her
employment in Hollywood as a writer, Vale likely felt frustrated. While her studio work
paid the bills, it also kept her from pursuing her main ambition to become a fulltime
writer. Despite her early promise, Rena never wrote a movie script that became a movie.
During her studio days, Vale began a professional relationship with writer C. H.
“Brick” Garrigues that soon morphed into a strong friendship. Assigned to work under
Garrigues, Rena learned from her new mentor what a scenario writer was and why
women competed against each other for prized Hollywood positions.53 Later appearing in
both her memoir and her affidavit, Garrigues was active in the Communist Party. Rena
became embroiled in a battle with Velda Johnston over scripts each wrote in
collaboration with Garrigues. He wrote:
It seems this clash of the girls for collaborator’s credit is not an isolated instance
but a sort of a disease in the studios. Practically all stenos in the movies are
former free-lance writers. Movie yarns are one type of writing on which two
heads are better than one; consequently, the girls get $210 per week for writing
half of a story for which the writer gets $1,000 per week.
Being in the studio, a steno cannot even attempt to sell her own stuff without
being blacklisted, but she has a chance to sell stuff under other names. So every
girl in the studio is looking for a name under which she can sell a yarn. She can
then get collaborator’s credit, half the check, and reestablish herself as a writer.53
52
Dave Keene, Oakland Tribune, March 25, 1928. I have not found copies of the screenplay, but
she described it in the Report 1943.
C.H. “Brick” Garrigues, May 25, 1934, quoted in George Garrigues, He Usually Lived with a
Female: The Life of a California Newspaperman. (Los Angeles: Quail Creek Press, 2006), 111.
53
23
Garrigues must have been impressed with Rena’s work because he praised her script over
Johnston’s and even judged that “it’s really too good for the movies.”54
Kudos from Garrigues may have contributed to her own increased anger and
artistic frustration. Likely she directed her ire against a system that patently relegated
women to subservient roles under men who might have been far less talented. For all her
disappointment in the Hollywood system that refused to recognize her work, she
remained friends with Garigues. She remembered that later, when she broke with the
Party, he “came to plead with me, almost tearfully, to remain true to the Communist Party
[emphasis original].”55 Although she rebuffed his friendly pleas to remain loyal, she later
admitted that “the hardest thing for me to do in leaving the Party was to say, ‘Goodbye
Brick.’” Her strong personal feelings for Garrigues explains why subsequently she stated
that “I was much relieved to learn… that he, too, has left the Party.”56
Through her writings, Rena made clear that the advent of the Great Depression
and the desperate need to ameliorate the profound suffering of its numerous victims
accounted for her leftist sympathies in the 1930s. She directly traced her activism to “a
Sunday afternoon discussion club” meeting in Los Angeles some time after the 1929
Stock Market Crash.57 While there, she met Christian M. Christoffersen, who truly
54
.H. “Brick” Garrigues, May 25, 1934, quoted in Garrigues, He Usually Lived with a Female.
55
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 60.
56
Ibid.
57
Ibid., 9.
24
“deserved the title of Saint.”58 He, as with her father, belonged to the Church of Jesus
Christ of Latter Day Saints. Through his work on the Unemployed Cooperative Relief
Association (UCRA), Christoffersen introduced Rena to the notion of self-help. She
became his secretary and eventually the group’s “Recording Secretary.” Vale particularly
drew life-long inspiration from the UCRA’s mission as presented metaphorically by
Christoffersen. Pointing to “a fallen tree beside the road,” she recalled, he “told me to
notice the shoots of new vegetation that were pushing up through the rot. ‘New life is
feeding on the old,’ he said.”59 So too might Americans draw on the ruins of a
procumbent economy to revive their economic situation through individual initiative and
hard work—the cornerstones of the American Republic. She worked with the UCRA for
two years and “for a brief time we lived on the brink of Utopia, but like all Utopias of the
past, ours fell apart.”60 It is impossible to say why Rena retrospectively felt so close to
utopia with the sources I have found. Was this a personal paradise or did she really feel
that the UCRA was on the cusp of alleviating poverty throughout Los Angeles. She may
have been smitten by Christoffersen. Her utopia may have collapsed because individual
initiative proved insufficient to counter the enormity of the Depression.
In any case, she strongly embraced the principles of the UCRA throughout her
life, especially the emphasis on self-help. Her commitment to individual initiative would
be reiterated regularly in her writings and would, for example, explain her criticism of the
58
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 9.
59
Ibid.
60
Ibid.
25
later Civil Rights Movement and its reliance on the federal government to uplift those
mired in poverty. Instead, she believed that the individual, within a locally controlled
community, could best help himself or herself.
In her memoir, Rena intoned a more pristine age with her wistful reflections on
self-help—a time before “the United States as a whole had been conditioned to unAmericanism in government.”61 It is hard to understand why Rena had such fond
memories of the lean Depression years. Perhaps she had enjoyed her involvement in the
non-doctrinaire struggle for justice that UCRA embodied, or perhaps she longed for an
era in her life before the Party had broken her spirit. Her later fiction similarly tapped into
her nostalgic view of the early1930s. Alas, the halcyon years did not last. The UCRA
collapsed, leaving Rena without the organization’s support network. Though she
continued to seek employment in Hollywood, her worsening financial situation drew her
toward the Communist Party orbit.
She claimed that her grief over a deceased cousin who had previously spoken well
of Communists led her to reconsider the Party, which she had opposed until then.62
Moreover, she was attracted to the Seventh World Congress of the Communist
International’s idealistic message that “Communists everywhere [should] soften up
toward their neighbors, . . . put their shoulders to the wheel and work harmoniously with
non-Communist organizations for the general welfare.”63 Of course, she eventually
61
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 36.
62
Ibid., 12.
63
Ibid.
26
decided that the Communist Party had been disingenuous and the speech promoting a
“Popular Front” against global injustice had “intended merely to deceive… as it had
me.”64
Following her termination from Universal Studios in 1936, she struggled to make
ends meet. Nonetheless, she continued to involve herself in grassroots organizing,
helping Nora Helgren, who Rena described as “mysterious with a flourish, dramatically
cautious and hush-hush,” in establishing a League of Women Shoppers in Los Angeles.65
Next, using her Democratic Party contact, Vale gained employment in the Federal
Theater Project of the Works Progress Administration.
Her work for the WPA put her in direct contact with others who claimed to be
members of the CPUSA. They inveigled her into becoming a card-carrying Communist.66
She joined the Communist Party in January 1937.67 Throwing herself into party work, her
next twenty months would be dominated by attending endless meetings in fourteen
organizations—she would later claim Communists overran each one.68 By August 1938,
64
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 12.
65
Ibid., 14-15.
66
Ibid., 17.
67
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 122-127; Vale, Against the Red Tide,
18. Her card was under the name Irene Wood, her chosen nom de guerre.
68
She claimed involvement in the Los Angeles Historical Records Survey of the Federal Writers
Project and in the Southwest Unit of the Federal Theater Project. She also belonged to the Los Angeles
Newspapers Guild, the League of Women Shoppers, the American Writer’s Union, the Worker’s Alliance,
and the Communist Party Membership Commission. Report of the Un-American Activities Committee,
1943. Her affidavit listed the groups without specifying dates. I consulted the entire work to find the
organizations.
27
however, she had left the CPUSA, admitting to having joined the Party with “rose
colored glasses.” Indeed, she not only had been bamboozled into believing that
Communists no longer sought revolution but, she confessed, she had fallen for “the
typical Communist technique” by allowing herself to be duped to join the Party by a
“big-name Communist,” namely in her case by the performer Paul Robeson.69 In a 1943
affidavit to CUAC, Rena portrayed herself as a naïve, idealistic victim of the Great
Depression and readily pled guilty of taking Communist Party propaganda at face value.
As a political ingénue, Rena absolved herself of responsibility for joining what by 1943
had become an abhorrent organization, especially since her brief encounter with
communism also conferred on her a life-long appreciation of the individual’s ability to
overcome powerful social or economic forces. Nonetheless, her contrite admission of her
eighteen-month dalliance with the Communist Party likely served her well in a maledominated culture that expected abject meekness and remorse from “fallen” women.
Rena had joined the Party for many reasons. The CPUSA promised an end to the
Great Depression by tossing capitalism aside, certainly appealing to a woman with a
stalled career. But as a practical matter, the Party also employed professional writers
during the Great Depression, when she desperately needed employment. Lastly, Rena
sought personal success against all odds, even in the face of gender-based discrimination.
She explained that Paul Robeson encouraged her to seek party membership because “he
felt sure that the Party would build me up as a writer if I joined it and took direction from
69
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 12-13.
28
it.”70 Too, Rena hoped the Communists—unlike the motion picture studios that relegated
women to a separate caste—could provide something beyond a job: meaningful
employment. Always in quest of professional validation, which a sexist capitalist society
denied her, she placed her faith in the supposed egalitarianism of the CPUSA without
identifying with the poor, the hungry, or with those downtrodden women who assumed
financial responsibility for their family.
In her brief fling with the CPUSA, Rena addressed various party issues and
engaged in several campaigns, mostly as a writer and researcher. She joined, for instance,
the Southwest Unit of the Federal Theaters Writers Project, which celebrated with a
“tremendous Communist Party ceremony” as the first “government theatre in the hands
of the Communist Party.”71 She claimed she formed part of the cadre of Communists who
dominated the production of the “Sun Rises in the West,”72 hoping the play’s “Party line”
would appeal to the migrants arriving in California from the Midwest.73 She later offered
support for this claim by explaining that the Simon J. Lubin Society, “completely under
the domination of the Communist Party,” provided the troupe with John Steinbeck’s
research notes on the field conditions encountered by farm migrants. The novelist, said
Vale, also happened to use these same notes in writing the Grapes of Wrath—prima facie
70
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 13.
71
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 147.
72
Ibid.
73
Ibid.
29
evidence of Steinbeck’s effort to promulgate communism.74 As an expression of the
democratic process inherent in the Party, the entire Communist faction had to agree to
each change in the play by a vote. Rejecting artistic creation by committee (as she had
during her studio days), Rena admitted she “became so disgusted… [she] failed to record
the silly antics of my comrades.”75 She disavowed the play early on in the process and
later insisted that she had absolutely nothing to do with the final product.
However, in her otherwise comprehensive memoirs, Rena never confessed to
having co-authored Land Grant, 1939 with Theodor Robinson, a man she later described
as a “personable young man, intelligent and bubbling over with energy and enthusiasm
for life.”76 A tale of how the wealthy robbed Californians out of their land, thereby
ruining the State’s economy in the process, the play ended sadly, with the authors
lamenting that California voters had failed to pass the “Ham and Eggs Plan”—known
also as the Retirement Life Payment Act, in 1938.77 Robinson and Vale asked
Californians, “What will return the sovereignty of California to you?”78 The play
answered the question by suggesting that a populist uprising—electorally or otherwise—
against entrenched wealth—in both the board room and the field—would end the
widespread suffering. Because the work was not produced until after Rena split with the
74
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 147.
75
Ibid., 148.
76
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 50.
77
Rena Vale and Theodor Robinson, Land Grant, 1939, 138, script, Records of the Federal
Theater Project, George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia (hereafter cited as Land Grant, 1939).
78
Ibid.
30
party, it is hard to say when the authors actually wrote the script. They may have started
working on the play before she bolted from the Party but continued working on it as she
embraced increasingly anticommunist ideas. Even with her fermenting apostasy, she
may have continued to support some form of government relief, and perhaps the play
represented her final contribution to a radical leftist cause—calling for the unemployed
elderly to become wards of the state.
Before leaving the Party, she continuously endured disturbing assignments that
pushed her away from her comrades. One endeavor, which especially struck her
personally, involved a smear campaign against Florence Artman of the Federal Theater
Project and included vicious verbal assaults on Louise Young.79 The cruel attacks by
Rena and her fellow Communists—designed to “isolate, expose, and expel” Young—
tragically culminated in their comrade’s suicide. 80 Rena subsequently admitted to feeling
“genuinely sorry for Mrs. Young” and deeply regretted taking “part in what amounted to
murder.”81 Over ten years later, she remained “most unhappy about it.”82
When Vale protested the hectoring of Young to her superiors, they presented her
with a litany of excuses that Rena judged as morally reprehensible. A party member
explained to her that the Party “must destroy our enemies by whatever method we can,”
79
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 29.
80
Ibid., 30.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid.
31
“a lie was a tactical maneuver,” and “all is fair in war.”83 Through this incident, Rena
realized just how little regard the Communists around her had for human life. She
concluded that because this group of Communists disregarded the sanctity of innocent
life than so too must all Communists.
In her time as a Communist, Rena ran “faster and faster on the Communist
treadmill.”84 But despite her growing disenchantment, she held off leaving the Party for
some time, “apparently . . . learned enough about deception from the Communists to be
able to deceive them about my personal feelings.”85 Enervated by her moral and
intellectual crisis, she became “unspeakably weary, and could find no rest.” 86 Reading
Gone with the Wind, she later claimed, briefly interrupted the constant drone of
Communist indoctrination and finally broke her Party-induced malaise.87 By mid-1938,
Rena, ready to leave the Party, started to feel rejuvenated. In August, she started her
journey from communist to anticommunist by testifying before the Dies Committee in
1939 and then by going to work for CUAC in 1940. The Party had broken her will but
she had rebounded.
Parlaying her alleged inside knowledge into an asset, Vale publicly denounced the
Communist Party and promised to expose its insidious operations in the United States.
83
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 30.
84
Ibid., 32.
85
Ibid., 34.
86
Ibid., 44.
87
Ibid., 45.
32
Always interested in garnering evidence of subversion from apostate Communists,
Representative Martin Dies invited Vale to testify as a friendly witness before the House
Committee on Un-American Activities. Particularly seeking information on the
infiltration of Communists and their fellow travelers into the federal bureaucracy, Dies,
the chair of HUAC, learned from Vale that she had belonged to a Party vanguard that had
successfully integrated itself into the Works Progress Administration throughout the
southwest, including the Federal Theatre Project and the Federal Writers Project.88 After
spending a few months testifying to HUAC, Vale began her life-long association with
California’s own “little HUAC.”
The California Joint Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities chaired
by Assemblyman Jack Tenney welcomed the ex-communist. Not only did she find
employment with the committee but she also became close friends with the three men
who formed its heart—Jack Tenney, Hugh Burns, and Richard Combs. At the outset, she
gave oral testimony and provided an affidavit naming all the communists or fellow
travelers she could remember. In contrast with her more general testimony to the Dies
Committee, her deposition to the Tenney Committee in February 1940 proved thoroughly
detailed. She later claimed that during this appearance she uncloaked the Communist
Party’s methods of indoctrination, fully turning “against [her] former comrades.”89 Over
the next few years, she continued to work closely with the Tenney Committee, indicting
88
Special Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Un-American Propaganda
Activities in the United States, 66th Cong., 3rd sess., 1939-1940, 1214.
89
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 65.
33
numerous individuals as radical subversives. But whereas her accusations provoked acute
interest among some Congressional investigators, they attracted scant notice among the
majority of Americans who focused instead on their immediate Japanese and German
enemies. Her accusations, however, would resonate ten years later when the hunt for reds
intensified during Joe McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade.
Years after Rena testified before CUAC and HUAC, the House Committee
questioned Lucille Desiree Ball Arnaz on her alleged communist loyalties. 90 Rena
claimed in her CUAC affidavit that she had met with other Communist Party members in
Lucille Ball’s home, absent the homeowner, in 1936.91 HUAC investigators asked Mrs.
Ball if Vale’s signed affidavit was true and if she knew her accuser—Ball denied both.92
Even though the television star could never fully account for her Party membership card,
Ball’s HUAC appearance did not inflict any lasting harm on her and she would use her
television persona to silence her critics and accusers. 93
90
House Committee on Un-American Activities, Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los
Angeles Area- Part 7: Hearing before the Committee on Un-American Activities House of Representatives,
83rd Cong., 1st Sess., 1953, 2565 (hereafter cited as Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los
Angeles Area, 1953).
91
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 127.
92
Investigation of Communist Activities in the Los Angeles Area, 1953, 2565. Susan M. Carini
analyzed Desi and Lucy’s response to HUAC’s investigation of Lucille Ball. Desi Arnaz gave an
impassioned speech defending Lucille by blurring the line between their fictional “I Love Lucy” characters
and their real situation. Lucille Ball admitted to registering as a Communist in 1936 to appease her
grandfather Fred Hunt. Ultimately, Vale’s affidavit did not figure prominently into Ball’s mounting HUAC
troubles. Ball continued to deny knowing Vale, who never recanted her affidavit’s veracity. Susan M.
Carini, “Love’s Labors Almost Lost: Managing Crisis during the Reign of ‘I Love Lucy,’ ” Cinema
Journal 43, no. 1 (Autumn, 2003), 54.
93
Carini, 55.
34
Rena’s reoccurring committee appearances earned her the wrath of the leftist
press. Women who turned witnesses faced a hostile popular culture armed with facile
stereotypes from Hollywood’s film noir that demonized females in the Communist
movement, even those who had repented. According to Olmstead, informants faced a
media that typically “portrayed assertive women as scary and unnatural.”94 In Against the
Red Tide, Vale—perhaps hoping to blunt the popular view of radical women—paints an
embattled self-portrait, subsuming her assertive nature.95 She writes that her testimony
before the Dies Committee elicited “a chorus of howls from the Communists and their
dupes, as well as from the Trotskyist corner.”96 Her shrill opponents likewise labeled her
unfairly as “a ‘red-baiter,’ a ‘labor-baiter,’ an ‘enemy of the working class,’ a ‘fascist,’
and an ‘anti-Semite,’ to mention a few of the nicer terms applied to me.”97 Rena also
recalls that her enemies used photographs to portray her as disheveled and uncomely,
undermining her femininity. One photographer, for instance, caught her in an
“unflattering pose on the witness stand—my hair was straggling, my hands were spread
in an awkward gesture, and the caption read: ‘In and Out of the Red with Rena.’ ”98
Another photographer snapped a shot as she used her hat to hide her face; the caption
describing the picture for “Los Angeles to laugh at was: ‘This is Rena Vale. Her face
94
Olmsted, 135-36.
95
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 72-5. These pages make this point particularly but the entire memoir
portrays her as an unusually passive individual.
96
Ibid., 72.
97
Ibid.
98
Ibid., 75.
35
doesn’t show but her slip does.’ ”99 By viciously subverting her feminine qualities and
impugning her character, the hostile press—Vale remembered—eventually pushed her
out of California and into seclusion in the Midwest.
In writing about persons who believed in powerful conspiracies, Hofstadter
noted: “We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is
afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well.”100
Seemingly, Rena’s own experience with the Communist Party both provoked and shaped
her life-long “paranoid” convictions about widespread conspiracies. In her memoir, she
writes cryptically that after leaving California, “I learned that I had not escaped watchful
eyes”101 and confesses to feeling personally threatened by anonymous phone calls,
mysterious, skulking men outside her home, and her apartment being ransacked, as if in a
pulp fiction story.102 These incidents confirmed her delusion that she had participated in
the grand Communist plot—a plot that continued to unfold, and that her knowledge of the
perfidious conspiracy not only demanded that she expose the dangerous cabal to
government officials but that her erstwhile comrades would seek to silence her.
Leaving her father’s Arizona ranch thrust Rena into an uncaring world: one with
sharply defined gender roles—with women relegated to a supporting cast; one which
would face crushing economic hardships for a decade; and one populated by persons who
99
Ibid. She claims that the photographer doctored the negative.
100
Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style of American Politics,” 40.
101
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 87.
102
Ibid.
36
could not or would not care for society’s needy citizens. Her experiences in the twenties
and thirties drew her into Communism. She sought a professional career as a writer but
failed to gain success despite her impressive ability, which the film studios in Hollywood
readily acknowledged. More than anything else, her daily job frustrations, in large part
based on her gender, likely made her vulnerable to the blandishments of Communist
Party members in Southern California. The Party also offered her brief sanctuary from
the Great Depression and a potential avenue towards a writing successful career. She
withdrew from, and eventually broke with, the Party only after she realized that her
options for advancement remained closed, possibly also due to her gender. Afterward,
she drifted from the far left towards the far right. Anticommunism became her most
enduring political identity. Among other things, she would then warn that the Democratic
Party was hopelessly tinged pink. This inclination to vilify liberals and other fellowtravelers placed her squarely in support of McCarthy and his ilk, and eventually drove her
to link the reformers of the Sixties to the Communist movement. Following her break
from the Party, Rena Vale ardently supported using investigating bodies to cleanse
society of any aspect that might be even remotely tainted with Communism. She
especially endorsed the CUAC as the best way of beating back Communist advances in
the Golden State.
The Anticommunist
In her 1953 memoir, Rena propounded her vision of the Communist Party.
Reflecting on her own experiences while McCarthyism was ascendant possibly altered
her memories to fit into the developing anticommunist culture. She used Dantesque
37
imagery to illustrate her conception of the Communism Party in California. As she
“struggle[d] to concretize” the Party and its activities, she visualized “a concentric
circle.... The hard core of disciplined Communism may be likened to [the] tight center,”
with the outer rings becoming increasingly less Communist.103 Critical to Rena’s view,
however, was that while the “outer rings are not Communist, yet they are part of it and
lead to it,” even if these outer rings were more of bunch of “jumbled rings.”104 She
maintained this mental construct as she worked with CUAC in the 1960s. For her, events
of that decade only seemed to bring the Communist Party’s long-held plans to fruition.
Vale felt personally responsible for what she saw as the country’s acquiescence to
Communism. She claimed that an “interlocking directorate” had allowed Communists to
strengthen the “energy of one Communist… many times.”105 She reckoned that, “a
handful of Communists” could eventually reach “hundreds of thousands,”106 and claimed
that leftist teachers, performers, and media personalities routinely indoctrinated
unsuspecting victims by strategically foisting innocuous-appearing pieces of propaganda
on American society. If the efforts of individual agents of misinformation went
unnoticed, the totality of their work subverted the values and beliefs of the republic.
Rena assumed a measure of personal responsibility for not blowing the whistle earlier:
“Much of the Communist mischief which Senator McCarthy is exposing today had its
103
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 5.
104
Ibid.
105
Ibid., 32.
106
Ibid.
38
beginning in the strategy meetings of the apparently unimportant Communists, such as
myself, in the 1930s.”107
Perhaps to assuage her profound guilt, Rena never shied away from invectives
when discussing the Communist Party. Starting in 1939, she consistently lacerated the
Party for all manors of crimes. Whatever its rhetoric may claim, she wrote, the
“Communist Party wanted to keep the unemployed in misery in order to use them to
further Communist aims.”108 To expose what she viewed as the Communist Party’s
charade, Rena related an encounter with a higher-ranking comrade, where she had
“naively” suggested that the poor “would be so much better off helping themselves in
California than they would be ‘marching on Washington.’” But her associate “merely
laughed at me and gave me to understand the self-help movement was doomed.”109 Not
only had her self-help proposal been rejected summarily in favor of political theater (a
march on the capital) that would only serve the Party’s propaganda campaign, she had
been disrespected as badly as when she worked for the studios. Clearly, then, personal
affronts caused her to doubt the Party and, together with the disgust she felt toward its
self-serving aims, led her to abandon her comrades and forever rebuke the radical
organization.
Vale believed that the CPUSA, the Comintern, all of the communist parties
worldwide, the Soviet Union, and the People’s Republic of China, among others,
107
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 32.
108
Ibid., 10.
109
Ibid.
39
threatened the existence of what she called Americanism. Both her first novel and her
memoir expanded on the idea that the United States, which embodied the forces of
freedom and good, was engaged in a war to the death against the bête noire of slavery
represented by the Soviet Union. In her Manichean universe, moreover, any criticism
and moral hand-wringing over the previous or current failings of the United States—such
as its own dependence on slavery or the current efforts to suppress civil liberties, served
only to embolden America’s enemies. Rena consigned all critics of American
triumphalism—even those seeking legal redress through civil disobedience, to the same
traitorous rank as the communists and their poputchik (fellow-travelers).
In “Stalin Over California,” published by both The American Mercury and the Los
Angeles Times in 1940, Vale warned the seemingly unsuspecting public of the
treacherous nature of the enemy. The article attempted to shore up support for
Assemblyman Sam Yorty’s investigation into Governor Culbert Olson’s State Relief
Administration (SRA) and to explain that California faced the threat of subversion from
foreign agents, the true goal of the Popular Front.110 A “Kremlin ring,” she claimed,
dominated the SRA and determined who would get its relief funds.111 Yet, despite
Governor Olson allowing Communists to dominate much of his administration, she
surmised that he simply did not understand how the Communist Party worked or that he
had facilitated the formation of the ring. After all, “Olson has been in politics only
110
Rena M. Vale, “Stalin Over California,” Los Angeles Times, March 29, 1940.
111
Vale, “Stalin Over California.”
40
during this Alice-in-Wonderland era” of the Great Depression.112 The true blame fell on
the CPUSA and its masters in the Soviet Union. Rena comforted her readers in
explaining that Yorty’s investigative work had already exposed the Party members in the
SRA and represented the only true prophylactic measure against the Red Menace. With
the Communist Party’s ever-apparent goal of destroying the United States, Vale also
cautioned against lapsing into what had been the previous naïve habit of hiring or electing
individuals without regard to their sympathies or even to their Communist membership.
As much as Rena loathed communism, nothing in her work demonstrated much
interest in Marxist theory. Her criticism of Dialectical Materialism never included any
comments on specific points made by Marx, or later communist theorists. She probably
never subscribed broadly to Marxist principles, even while in the Party, which she joined
only after the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International in 1935 endorsed
the Popular Front in the struggle against fascism.113 According to her affidavit to CUAC,
she disagreed with the Communist Party’s revolutionary goals, believing that change
should “be made according to the democratic traditions of the United States.”114 She later
declared that the Communist International’s public rejection of violence had made the
Party acceptable. Her focus on the Party as a potential source of benevolent and
democratic change contradicted the Marxist-Leninist commitment to the inevitable
112
Vale, “Stalin Over California.”
113
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 123.
114
Ibid.
41
violent revolution of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie. Clearly, Rena never truly
embraced the Marxist notion of a class revolution.
Vale never declared herself a conservative but she did castigate liberalism. She
felt that liberalism would inevitably lead to the United States becoming a colony of the
Soviet Union. As such, she falls under Hofstadter’s definition of a politically paranoid
citizen. Yet, this was not simply Rena’s disconnect from modern America, as she became
an anticommunist after working for the Party. Vale’s disdain for communism encouraged
her to malign the two hallmarks of liberalism: the New Deal and the Great Society. Her
fervor against these and other government programs would not end as long as the Soviet
Union still menaced the United States. She summarized the danger of Washington’s
reform efforts: “after a time I became convinced that the ‘liberalism’ of the Socialists,
Social Democrats, New Dealers and unaffiliated dupes was actually a stepping stone to
Communism.”115 Through this statement, she warned her fellow citizens of the danger in
the seemingly harmless federal programs.
She never, however, expressed her specific views concerning most liberal
programs after her abandonment of the Party in 1938.116 Rena even refrained from
weighing in on the bellwether of the conservative resurgence, Senator Barry Goldwater’s
1964 presidential campaign. Nevertheless, the Civil Rights Movement quickly earned her
ire, especially as African-American militancy increased, and it aroused her to frequently
115
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 88.
116
Report of the Un-American Activities Committee, 1943, 88; Against the Red Tide, 9, 11.
42
jot down vitriolic comments about the left or liberals on her index cards and reports in the
sixties.
By emphatically rejecting liberalism in 1938, Rena took her place on what was
then the right wing of the American political spectrum. Not surprisingly, she renounced
the policies of the Truman Administration and endorsed HUAC, Joe McCarthy, and
CUAC, especially under the aegis of Senator Tenney. By 1952, the country’s
conservative movement had generally joined her ideologically, even though the
Republican Party remained in the hands of the moderate conservative, Dwight
Eisenhower.
Even though religion proved crucial in the rise of McCarthyism as well as in the
subsequent emergence of the New Right,117 Rena remained vague on this issue. In fact,
her pronouncements on religion followed her politics; she only mentioned it in an
anticommunist context. Despite having “never been religious,” she tentatively sought
spiritual succor after leaving the Communist Party, although this may have been more out
of corporeal loneliness than from the need for divine guidance. 118 Because her initial
post-communist religious experience proved less than satisfactory, Rena wrote, “I put
away my Book of Mormon and didn’t open it for many years.”119 Her fiction, too, with
the possible exception of The Red Court, overtly ignored religious themes, and she never
offered any religious opinions in her work for CUAC. Prominent anticommunist religious
117
Fried, 5; McGirr, 102-03.
118
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 66.
119
Ibid.
43
leaders never won her over as a convert. If she harbored strong spiritual feelings, she
kept them to herself.
The 1964 Barry Goldwater presidential campaign drew many grassroots
volunteers because of his religious appeal. Indeed, his campaign widely attracted “those
who understood the primary problem with communism to be its rejection of
spirituality.”120 While Rena had a more complex view of communism, she might have
been more profoundly drawn to this important presidential campaign if she had had
stronger spiritual convictions. At no time did she express any agreement with Goldwater
over the spiritual battle against communism, especially leading up to the presidential
election. Nevertheless, she certainly opposed President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great
Society and expected Goldwater to be a better president than Johnson—but just for
different reasons than those of the many grassroots supporters of Goldwater.
Rena struggled to be a professional writer, experiencing success but also hitting
the “glass ceiling.” The Great Depression and her gender limited her employment,
preventing her from being what she wanted most: to be a writer. She sought to improve
her life within the CPUSA. However, she was disappointed. Instead, she found herself
immersed in a new world that demanded her full attention, sapping her of her energy. She
could barely make ends meet despite all of her contributions to the Party. The constant
demands broke her spirit. She then turned to un-American investigators for help. With
120
Rymph, 168.
44
their support and encouragement, she would write cathartic stories, offering other insight
into her thoughts.
45
Chapter 3
SOUNDING THE TOCSIN: VALE’S WRITINGS
Anticommunism
Rena began her career as a Hollywood studio writer but ended up as an author of
fiction. Her body of work included three futuristic science fiction novels, one novel about
the Communist Party taking control of the Federal government, and one romance novel
set in Illinois in the 1860s. An examination of her fiction reveals a woman always
grappling with the world—especially with the threat communism. With her science
fiction—her most prominent and successful work—she joined a growing number of
female writers helping to transform the field from an amateur pastime into a respectable
literary genre.121 She and other women writers, according to the literary scholar Brian
Atteberry, “without necessarily being feminist or even including female characters, still
tended to force awareness of gender roles.”122 Within this highly gendered writing style,
Rena’s work constantly reflected her experiences, hopes, and fears—especially of the
future.
All of Rena’s fiction focused on the plight of the individual against society, and it
frequently celebrated the struggle of a heroic individual against tyranny. In all cases, the
utterly corrupt ruling class—including intellectual and religious leaders—remained out of
touch with the needs of the individual. Intellectuals, for instance, showed a proclivity
toward implementing experiment ideas, even at the expense of common sense or without
121
Eric Leif Davin, Partners in Wonder: Women and the Birth of Science Fiction, 1926-1965
(New York City: Lexington Books, 2005).
122
Brian Atteberry, Decoding Gender in Science Fiction (New York City: Routledge, 2002), 6.
46
regard for their effect on the hapless lower classes. The throngs of workers, proletariats,
and the poor typically fell victims to whatever new idea elite hucksters peddled. In Vale’s
novels, the heroic protagonist—the embodiment of American individualism—battled
enemies from above and below who threatened the freedom of the individual. Indeed, her
stories’ denouement inevitably occurred only after the hero shrugged off blandishments
from the elite to join that group and simultaneously resisted the impulse to embrace the
popular collectivist movements that appealed to the masses. Squeezed between ignorant
masses and a corrupt elite, Vale’s hero likely mirrored how Rena viewed her own life.
Nonetheless, in her novels, as in her testimony before legislative committees, she sought
primarily to sound the tocsin against a Communist movement intent on exploiting a
society weakened by a decadent, avaricious elite and a gullible mass of Americans
increasingly lured by utopian panaceas offered up by demagogic apostles of
totalitarianism.
Rena’s first published book of fiction tolled such an alarm. Despite its awkward
title, The Red Court, Last Seat of National Government of the United States of America:
The Story of the Revolution to Come through Communism added to the chorus of gloomy
warnings of the communist menace issued during the peak of McCarthyism. In contrast
with her later stories that involved fantastic adventures across the stars or through time,
The Red Court takes place in the near future and foretells of a successful Communist
Party plot to seize the federal government, a fractured mirror image of Edward Bellamy’s
Looking Backward, which had been published in 1888 and had prophesized the triumph
of socialism in the United States. Although a work of fiction, the novel—said Vale—
47
rested on “historical facts of Communist methods and techniques and knowledge of the
secret powers operating in the background to create revolutionary situations with a view
to overthrowing organized governments of the world.”123 Armed with such
verisimilitudes, the author hoped to offer an alarming scenario in which radical
conspirators succeed in replacing the American federal system with an unelected premier
secretly working for the Soviet Union.
Told through a diary found in “the ruins of the last seat of government of the First
Republic of the United States of America,” the first person narrative relates what
happened after the newly minted communist government attempted to consolidate its
power. The cautionary tale enabled Rena to borrow from her own experiences in the
Party to note how the Communists were destined for initial success as well as subsequent
certain failure.124 Like Vale, the novel’s protagonist, Mary Johnson, toiled for the
Communist Party as a minor functionary. But when Johnson’s special shorthand
methods proved virtually impossible to decipher, the Party assigned her to work as a
secretary to the Commander-in-Chief Rose Garfield Gregg, or the “Great Rose.”125
Johnson’s lofty position afforded her a unique behind-the-scenes view of the unfolding of
the Communist bid to take over the United States. As in the case of the novel’s author,
Mary’s close contacts with communists exposed her to their mendacity and hypocrisy,
causing her to grow increasingly distrustful and scornful of communism. The
123
Rena M. Vale, The Red Court, Last Seat of National Government of the United States of
America: The Story of the Revolution to Come through Communism (Detroit: Nelson Publishing Company,
1952), 11.
124
Ibid., 15.
48
autobiographical story thus followed the main character’s transformation from a
moderately dedicated communist to a vehemently militant anticommunist.
Despite Vale’s disclaimer that “any similarity to real persons, living or dead,” of
the novel’s cast of characters “is purely coincidental,” Mary Johnson clearly resembled
her creator.125 Both Mary and Rena worked as a secretary and assistant on various
Communist Party projects. Whereas Rena ended up with various positions such as
researcher for the Federal Theatre Project, Mary dutifully took notes for several
government officials and then passed on confidential information to the Party.126 In fact,
Rena’s multiple duties included playwriting, in sharp contrast to Mary’s strict gendered
work as a secretary. With over twenty years of clerical experience, Rena created a
character in Mary that she knew well. The main difference involved cleansing Mary of
any of her own “masculine” traits—ambition, assertiveness, excessive rationality—and
casting her as ultra feminine. In this way, Mary would conform to the political
orthodoxy expected particularly by conservative anticommunists, who demanded that
women remain within their respective boundaries.
Mary and her creator both believed themselves in the center circle of a deadly
Communist conspiracy that also threatened the nation. Mary’s recognition of the dire
threat slowly develops after Communist agents assign her to act as the personal secretary
to the Great Rose, the chief of the provisional [no comma] military government. As the
125
Vale, The Red Court, 15.
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 45; Vale, The Red Court, 22. Rena’s later work with CUAC was as
a secretary, investigator, and expert on the Communist Party.
126
49
novel opens, the newly installed Great Rose explains on television that the faltering
federal government had collapsed following repeated clashes between Fascists and
Communists and now had been replaced by her regime.127 Mary explains to her diary that
Rose is really a Communist who had deflected communist accusations with her charming
Southern demeanor. Moreover, “[h]er accusers,” Mary adds, “were howled down by the
liberal pressure groups.”128 Additionally, the Communist Party, had orchestrated the
government’s collapse and then had successfully infiltrated strategic government and
military positions in order to create a Communist dictatorship. However, according to
Mary, the real key to the Party’s success had been its deception of the public. Rose had
falsely claimed that the country had triumphed over Fascism, Communism, isolationism,
“minority hating, mad-dog reactionaries,” and “most important of all” against “the cruel
and insatiable tax-eaters.”129
Instead, in an obvious (and didactic) irony intended by the author, the American
people unwittingly became puppets of the Communist International while believing their
country had defeated internal subversives. Moreover, The Great Rose again deceived the
public when she informed the country in her initial broadcast as commander that she
expected the coup d’état to result in the formation of a coalition government.
Bamboozled like everyone else, Mary expresses a feeling of betrayal when Rose creates a
military dictatorship.123 This incident serves as the first hint of the heroine’s gradual
127
Vale, The Red Court, 17-18.
128
Ibid., 16-17.
129
Ibid., 19.
50
apostasy, and it suggests Rena’s own disenchantment when she realized the Popular
Front was a lie.
With the Great Rose, Mary next travels to the central government facility that she
dubs the “Red Court.” From this location, the Great Rose reigns, as all semblance of a
national political structure collapses. Mary’s position allows her to witness the Party lose
control of Rose and seemingly break apart.130 Rose’s policies appear entirely destructive
to the country. A resistance group emerges, however, and begins to battle the military
dictatorship. Most of the members of the armed opposition represent army veterans who
the new government had discharged because they refused to embrace communist
doctrine, even after being denied their pensions. Mary’s old flame, Lieutenant Ted Brand,
or Teddy as Mary calls him, assumes a pivotal role as a counter revolutionary leader.
Mary remembers “Brand, the Firebrand” as someone who earlier had railed against
government programs that seemingly would acclimate the “American people for
collective living.”131 The resistance forces eventually overthrow the Red Court and set
the fractured country on a fatal collision course with an unnamed foreign power. The
archeologists who uncovered Mary’s diary note in the introduction that greater vigilance
on the part of the American population might have thwarted the “bold attempt on the part
of [the] . . . foreign power [the Soviet Union] to establish world government” and also
might have avoided “a ruinous twenty years’ war.”132
130
Vale, The Red Court, 92, 109-10.
131
Ibid., 98.
132
Vale, The Red Court, 15.
51
The psychological aspects of The Red Court highlight Mary’s transition from a
party functionary to an anticommunist hero. At the opening of the story, Mary is alone,
unsure, and scared. She fears that the Party has figured out that she comes from a highly
religious family and that she still has feelings for her childhood boy friend. Relocating to
the Red Court fails to bring her any more happiness. A climate of intrigue proves
pervasive, and even Rose suffers from increasing paranoia and isolation. The
psychological drama reaches its climax after one of Mary’s confidants, also afflicted with
mental illness, dies because of Communist Party machinations. Mary’s mental state
probably served as a metaphor for Rena’s own difficulties in departing the Party. Both
Vale’s affidavit and her memoir described the aftermath of her exit as a period of acute
tension and stress. Communist efforts to re-indoctrinate her nearly broke her feisty spirit.
She endured daily sessions for two harrowing months with a “frightening” Communist
propagandist, listening daily to his various pleas to remain with the Party. 133 He
suggested that if she left the Party, she would be permanently unemployed. As if this was
not enough pressure, another Party member threatened her life, “as if out of a corny
gangster story.”134
In the novel, Mary’s mental problems reach a crescendo about the time she meets
the man who would set her on a path to salvation, Dr. Alec Morse. Revealing himself a
member of the resistance, he serves as a courier between Mary and Teddy, who can
communicate with each other through their mutual command of Mary’s arcane shorthand
133
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 60.
134
Ibid., 62.
52
system. In turn, with Teddy’s help, Mary begins to transmit confidential information to
the outside world, freeing herself from the Party’s thought control while decisively aiding
the resistance movement. Teddy himself develops into an important leader of the
counter-revolution.
Dr. Morse also cures Mary’s psychological problems by pointing out that they
stemmed from denying her true self. Indeed, by endeavoring to better the working class,
she had unwittingly subverted her own beliefs in individual freedom. Morse’s diagnoses
combines with Mary’s increasing awareness of the Communists’ disregard for the
welfare of the working class. Eventually, she sees through the cynical charade and
realizes that the CPUSA is nothing more than a cover for the Soviet Union as it conquers
the world.135 She then recants her radical beliefs, embraces Teddy’s religious viewpoint,
and likewise endorses his muscular American spirit as the best anti-communist
antidote.136 The Red Court, in fact, concludes that traditional American values are far
better suited to provide for the welfare of the proletariat than the communist program.
Mary’s emotional problems disappear as she achieves self-realization with the aid of Dr.
Morse.
Teddy never utters a word of dialogue in the novel. But his inspirational letters to
Mary champion the struggle against the red menace, stiffening her desire to resist the
infernal foe. The cathartic tale ends with a metaphor for Rena’s redemption from the
clutches of communism. The resistance’s plan was to enter the Red Court and recapture
135
Vale, The Red Court, 52.
136
Ibid., 100.
53
the national government. As the fighting nears, Mary and Alec coordinate with Teddy to
ensure that he and his band will enter the facility.137 Unbeknownst to Mary until the final
hours, Alec plans to martyr himself with homemade explosives, thereby creating an
opening for the resistance to enter the bunker. As the final moments approach, Mary
decides not to wake the doctor as asked but instead looks to expiate her crime of being a
Communist and aiding in the creation of the Red Court. Her final diary entry states,
“And, God, if tonight an angel of mercy hovers somewhere between this world and the
next, please let Teddy know that in my last moment I stood as an American, and that his
God is my God.”138 This sentence seems to be Rena reaching through the book and
proudly proclaiming that she was no longer in the thrall of communism but had embraced
a Christian, American God. Rena’s “biblio-patriotism” was impeccable as she sacrificed
her obvious stand-in on the eve of reuniting the lovers. Indeed, Mary gives herself
completely to the cause of defeating communism. Rena, in a far less dramatic way, would
also follow her character’s lead and dedicate her life to the struggle against the
Communist Party.
Clearly channeling her own experience into the fictional account, Vale’s first
novel told a story of personal salvation and national calamity. Indeed, The Red Court
exuded decided pessimism that the author’s country could withstand the efforts of
zealous Soviet agents and propagandists who sought to deliver the United States into the
U.S.S.R.’s orbit. But rather than authoring other less-than-sanguine novels, Vale decided
137
Vale, The Red Court, 140.
138
Ibid., 148.
54
in 1953 to pen her memoirs, titled Against the Red Tide, which would represent her only
non-fiction book. 139
Rena’s ninety-six page confession explains why she became a communist and
then what made her a truly loyal American. The book begins with Senator Jack B.
Tenney’s flattering introduction, which not only connects her to the roots of the country
by calling her a “many-generation American whose ancestors pioneered from Plymouth
Rock to the last frontier in Arizona Territory” but also endeavors to erase the stain of her
Communist Party affiliation.140 Having established Vale’s flawless pedigree, Tenney
lauds her “fine, self-effacing patriotism,” and notes that “she became one of the first to
expose [the Communist] network in California.”141 He also informs the reader that
Rena’s growing record of anticommunist publications was rapidly garnering her heaps of
respect in patriotic circles. Tenney’s effusive endorsement, coming after his own political
implosion, would serve only to boost Vale’s image among those already predisposed to
agree with anticommunist arguments.
We will never know the true depths of Rena’s animus toward Communism.
Rather than displaying her usual forceful writing voice, the memoir is replete with
defensive and gratuitous apologies regarding her brief party membership. Perhaps to
appear properly feminine—and not the virago who “would pal around” with Godless
Robert H. Zieger, “The Evolving Cold War: The Changing Character of the Enemy Within,
1949-63,” American Communist History Vol. 3, No 1. 2004. 22-23.
139
140
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 4.
141
Ibid.
55
Communists, she intentionally subverted her vigorous style and firmly abjured her former
Party affiliations and comrades.142 Vale’s feckless prose betrays the desire of the
groveling supplicant to receive plenary absolution for her past infractions. Anything less
might not have earned her a respected place in the anti-Communist crusade.
Science Fiction
Rena subsequently wrote three science fiction novels: Beyond the Sealed World
(1965), The Day after Doomsday, (1970), and Taurus Four (1970). The novels bear no
direct link to each other yet contain some common themes. Each novel portrays a bleak
world and is set in a dystopia, an imagined place that is critically flawed. The
protagonists succeed because of their confidence and innate talent, despite by being beset
by corrupt and selfish elites or moronic masses. While the storylines are captivating, their
message seems to be that humans are doomed, even if individuals can achieve greatness
through perseverance. The character Teddy in Against the Red Court presaged her other
heroic characters, even if none seem as self-assured.
The worlds imagined in each book fit within the utopian tradition found in science
fiction. But the setting is not a perfect, imagined society but a ruined world in the process
of recreating itself as a cataclysm ensues. Rena’s message is clear: beware of the future.
Yet, Rena focuses on the potential for personal betterment, perhaps even salvation. In
Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950, the English
142
Bentley, too, had a difficult time persuading her new anticommunist colleagues that she
regretted her participation in the Communist Movement. Olmsted, 166.
56
professor Carol F. Kessler found that women typically wrote utopian fiction through a
gendered lens, with their stories often resolving familiar issues.143 She noted, however,
that after 1960, females writing in this genre commonly “looked outward into space,
forward or backward in time, or inward into the psychic depths, to locate clear space for
alternatives to present conditions.”144 “Space exploration and colonization replace,”
according to Kessler, “a closed western frontier.”145 This new extra-terrestrial region
created an open place for writers, like Rena, to forge the potential for a better, if hard
won, tomorrow.
Rena’s first science fiction work, Beyond the Sealed World, portrays a scientist
working in a hermetic civilization and living in a world divided into those who live in a
network of enclosed cities and those who live outside these cities. The entire story,
which takes place in the American Southwest and in northern Mexico, focuses on the fate
of one city of the interconnected, international citadels that forms the sealed world. A
perfectly autarchic city—like all other cities on earth, its exceedingly advanced
technology allows it to survive without ever interacting with the outside world. In fact,
every thing manufactured in this city depended on recycled materials, including its
citizens. The hero, Daly 1444, as with everyone else, is a clone, created in a factory from
143
Carol Farley Kessler, Daring to Dream: Utopian Fiction by United States Women Before 1950
(Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1994), xvii.
144
Ibid., 249.
145
Ibid.
57
someone else’s genetic code.146 In this hyperbolized version of the Bolshevik system,
scientific management by unseen masters permits social engineers to create people suited
perfectly for predestined jobs, from scientists to security guards and secret police to
entertainers.
The civilization described by Vale bears a striking resemblance to Aldous
Huxley’s Brave New World. Both Huxley and Vale imagined societies that worship
science but are spiritually dead. Engineers design and run each society. Huxley and Vale
telescoped the use of current technology to warn about its disastrous consequences on
future generations. Even though Huxley’s work predated the discovery of DNA, he
describes population control through a scientifically managed eugenics program.147
Vale’s novel likewise employs eugenic standards to categorize humans by potential.
Although she uses cloning while Huxley relies on in utero manipulation to preserve the
caste system, both envisioned a society governed by amoral scientists. Both novels, too,
are set in a world of desolate wastelands punctuated by towering, modern citadels
connected by flying vehicles. Coincidently, both feature the southwestern United States
as a redoubt of the wild and savage human. Rena seemingly chose this locale on the basis
of her familiarity with the area Vale and Huxley also share one other striking similarity.
Both authors believe that science must be tempered with morality. At end of
Vale’s novel, the protagonist chooses to travel to the place where “they’ve learned how to
146
147
Rena M. Vale, Beyond the Sealed World (New York: Paperback Library, 1965), 12.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World (1932; repr., New York: Perennial Library, 1978), 2-3;
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World Revisited (Perennial Library: New York, 1958), 16.
58
cope with all things of nature—a place where men have learned the science of living,”
which included “beauty, and music of the gods, and very little debility.”148 This place
represents neither the sterile sealed world nor the chaotic world found outside of the
cities. And, whereas Huxley’s novel ends with the main character succumbing to
madness, the author later notes the possibility of another option.149 He forecasts that
“science and technology would be used as though…they had been made for man, not (as
at present and still more so in the Brave New World) as though man were to be adapted
and enslaved to them.”150 Rena’s story precisely mirrors this idea. She presents various
relationships models between science and morality. But in the end, only harmony
between the two could ensure a healthy future for society.
Rena Vale’s novel warns of the dangers of subordinating the individual for the
sake of society. Conceding that all technologically advanced societies worship science,
Rena nevertheless speaks firmly against the Soviet notion that civilization should
function under the credo, “Science can serve Man only if Man serves Science,” and her
lead character experiences momentary euphoria after hearing this phrase at the inception
of the story.151 But Vale ultimately shows the destructive effects of state domination on
the individual. Indeed, the novel’s hero returns to the sealed world and chooses to shut
148
Vale, Beyond the Sealed World, 192-91.
149
Huxley, Brave New World, vii.
150
Ibid., viii.
151
Vale, Beyond the Sealed World, 17.
59
the citadel down in order to liberate his fiancée, as he himself had been liberated when
he rejected the totalitarian society.
The ending of the novel affords Vale an opportunity to offer a different view on
the role of revolution. As they are about to destroy the only civilization they know, Daly
converses with his only remaining ally and laments their failure to save most of the city’s
residents in the course of destroying the sealed world. Overcome with guilt, Daly feels
responsible for the countless deaths about to occur.152 The ally, a member of the secret
police, steels his resolve, telling Daly to do the same. The guard rejects the official
propaganda and welcomes leaving the comforts of his insular community for the freedom
of the wild land. His voice seems to convey the author’s draconian view that the
overthrow of totalitarianism requires enormous sacrifice that will go far beyond Mary’s
self-immolation and demand the annihilation of entire societies. Indeed, Rena seems to
subscribe to the notion expressed famously as “better dead than Red.”
Daly’s ally initially hoped to save many citizens of the sealed world but “changes
are wrought with suffering, the greater the change, the greater the suffering.”153 Facing
Daly’s increased reluctance to accept the impending slaughter, the secret policeman
explains that the breakdown of technological civilization all over the world had prompted
the incumbent regime to respond to the crisis by producing vast surpluses of consumer
goods.154 The impromptu speech continues:
152
153
Ibid., 183.
Ibid.
Vale, Beyond the Sealed World, 183-84. In the Soviet version of Rome’s bread and circuses,
Moscow offered consumer goods.
154
60
The sensible thing to do would be to leave the gate open for people to flee into the
wasteland. But will our people go? No, they cling desperately to the world that
has cuddled them, nursed them like infants, thought for them, directed them in
every robot move. Not even to save their lives will most of them leave this cursed
mother-citadel.155
For the ally—and perhaps for Vale—the refusal of the city’s denizens to be awakened
from their idyllic slumber as danger looms ever closer justifies their widespread
slaughter. Rena’s apparent endorsement of such cold-blooded tactics suggests
acceptance of her own version of Stalinist casuistry that the end justifies the means. She
seemed to be channeling her own thoughts through Daly’s companion because the book
ends with Daly and company escaping only after igniting a scorched earth solution.
Through violent struggle against the totalitarian government, Daly saves himself
and many others following the cataclysm. But Vale may not have wanted the reader to
find solace in the novel’s denouement. Rather, she might have hoped readers would
consider the striking similarities between the sealed world and contemporary American
society. After all, both could be seen ignoring the growing peril of Communism while
being seduced by the promise of ever-more consumer goods. If the gravity of the threat
to the sealed world justified Rena’s literary violence, the U.S.S.R.’s mortal threat to the
United States clearly sanctioned CUAC, HUAC, and other extraordinary responses to the
Red specter.
Rena employs other metaphors to convey her ideas. She presents the conflict
between the scientific world and the savage, superstitious world as a love triangle. Two
155
Ibid., 184.
61
women love Daly, and in the end, they quarrel with each other and perish along with the
sealed world—both the savage and the scientist immolated. The conflict between the two
women ensues because each felt that Daly was her lover. Vale describes their physical
fracas as a cannonade destroyed the city’s citadel. “They were locked together in a
primitive dance,” Rena writes, “each with hands on the other’s throat. Calinda’s flimsy
garments were tattered, trailing like discarded veils, and one of La Bruga’s bloody white
boots was missing.”156 As flames engulf the pair, “a dancing figure, gyrat[es] among the
smoke puffs and red and blue flames. It was two dancers locked together, one trailing a
film of pale blue, the other with hair like coiled serpents rippling over shoulders and
back.”157 Calinda represents scientific society and La Bruga embodies superstitious
society. Both pursue the love of one man but instead destroy each other. If in the
aftermath of Daly’s triumph the world’s future prospect appears better, it is only because
reason and science have trumped superstition and savagery.
Rena’s bleak view of humanity is evident in many aspects of her first science
fiction novel. That her advanced society is capable of a heartless and cruel pursuit of a
strict utilitarian philosophy that emphasizes the collective good at the expense of the
individual is emblematic of mankind’s worst impulses. Indeed, in this society those
deemed unneeded by the technocratic elite are discarded without the slightest remorse. A
reduction oven exists to euthanatize the “Useless Ones,” those rendered anachronistic by
156
Vale, Beyond the Sealed World, 190.
157
Ibid., 191.
62
technological advances.158 Even once highly regarded scientists end up in the trash bin of
history after they outlive their value to society, though they are allowed to choose
between “banishment beyond the walls” or “painless, merciful, and speedy death in a
reduction oven.”159 Akin to the Five-Year Plans that Stalin imposed on the Soviet Union,
the sealed society’s utilitarianism is totally devoid of the moral or religious standards that
give value to human life. In Beyond the Sealed World, Rena Vale thus offers up a
cautionary parable that highlights the malignant aspects of totalitarian societies,
particularly those that foster man’s inhumanity to man.
Rena’s second science fiction novel was Taurus Four. This is the tale of a space
sociologist named Dorian Frank, who is marooned on a planet populated by a tribe
descendant from hippies and struggles for survival and eventual rescue. Several
generations back, in the mid-1960s, the ancestors of the inhabitants of planet had been a
small group of Flower Children living in Golden Gate Park. However, extra-terrestrial
aliens had abducted and then relocated them to the uninhabited planet, called Taurus
Four.160 In outer space, the hippies and their descendants had further devolved into
primitives who had abandoned the use of tools as well as clothes and were incapable of
understanding complex ideas. But if the perfectly rich and benign environment secured
the well being of the inhabitants and allowed them to live harmoniously with nature, their
reversion to a primitive state had extinguished their humanity. Their society degenerates
158
Vale, Beyond the Sealed World, 14.
159
Ibid., 30.
160
Rena M. Vale, Taurus Four (New York: Paperback Library Inc., 1970), 54.
63
into a tribal structure in which a chief holds all of the power with crime, such as violence,
almost nonexistent. Vale’s message seems evident: the return-to-nature movement—
fostered by the counter-culture in the Sixties, was destined to produce the same results.
Even though Taurus Four represented Vale’s only novel set in outer space, she clearly
remains focused on the problems afflicting late-1960s America—especially Communism.
Once again her pessimism is palpable as she paints a grim picture of the future.
In Taurus Four, the Cold War ends with the United States and the Soviet Union
merging to form a world government to fight an alien threat to the human race. In the
union of the two superpowers, writes Vale, “The Eastern, or Soviet, bloc had dictated
fashion as well as many other social, political, and scientific customs,” indicating a
virtual Soviet victory.161 Rena adds poignantly that Soviet supremacy “was accepted and
[it] became a matter of historical record that the ‘bourgeois-capitalist’ countries were
decadent, the people degenerating into pulpy softness.”162 In fact, the author saw the very
likely possibility that the Cold War would end only if both sides were forced to act for
mutual benefit and then the USSR would probably dominate. Their supposed
intractability reinforced the idea that the United States and the Soviet Union fought the
Cold War because each side struggled for its survival. Peace could only mean one side
triumphing over the other.
Gender plays a dominant role in the novel, with Rena using it throughout as a
metaphor to explain the novel’s plot and conflict. She also employs gendered language to
161
Vale, Taurus Four, 20.
162
Ibid.
64
suggest the impending demise of the West. And, indeed, unless the American people
abandon their effete values and feckless policies and return to their manly and muscular
ways of yesteryear, the Soviet Union triumph is inevitable. Vale blames the loss of
national vigor on the blurring of gender roles. “At some point in history,” she writes,
“the sexes in the Western nations reached a point of sameness. Males and females looked
alike, dressed alike, thought more or less alike and worked side by side at the same
tasks.” On the other hand, “[t]he Eastern nations… did not grant [women] equal
status.”163 A close observer of the ideas and rhetoric of the burgeoning women’s
liberation efforts at UC Berkeley, Rena traced the inversion of gender roles to the birth of
the Women’s Liberation Movement. The completion of Taurus Four shortly after her
stint working for CUAC, coincided with the period of her most active efforts to reverse
what she deemed as radical social change, including granting women full gender equality.
Despite suffering gender-based limitations to her career, Rena expressed wholehearted
support for traditional gender roles. Through her futuristic novel, she seemly warns
against what she fears will be the logical conclusion of the Women’s Liberation
Movement.
Vale’s story contains many other examples of her use of gendered language to
comment on social issues, specifically heterosexual relationships. A metaphor for
civilization, proper heterosexual relations demand that women must maintain their home
sphere without dominating their mates. At the novel’s conclusion, Dorian marries the
163
Vale, Taurus Four, 20.
65
smartest, prettiest, and least atavistic hippie, named Teeda, after he finally returns to his
space ship. Throughout the story, her femininity comforts him. One such moment occurs
during a brief respite when the two of them are alone. He was clumsily washing his
clothes when Teeda, who had never touched clothes before, interrupts and says, “‘I wash
now. I think I do more better than you.’ He laughed. ‘It's instinctive I guess—something
carried in the genes that makes women want to wash clothes!’”164 But his own gender
also predisposes him to act in a patriarchal manner. The hero admits on one occasion that
despite his best attempt at distancing himself from Teeda, he “found it difficult not to
take her in his arms, hold her tightly and promise her anything she wanted.”165 Even her
vulnerability serves to provide Dorian with a sense of purpose, empowering him to want
to engage the world in order to provide for her. Teeda even resolves the final conflict by
using both her knowledge of an alien language and her feminine proclivity to find
peaceful solutions to problems. She in fact persuades the would-be conquerors to eschew
warfare and withdraw peacefully to their alien world.166 If Teeda’s timely diplomatic
intervention prevented a violent confrontation, Vale’s life’s work suggests that she never
felt similarly sanguine about a peaceful resolution to the Cold War.
Rena creates Teeda as a unique woman in the tribal society that had developed
from the original hippies. Dorian instantly notices the naked native immediately upon
meeting her. Rena’s description evokes a racial imagery that likewise makes Teeda not
164
Vale, Taurus Four, 108.
165
Ibid., 101.
166
Ibid., 156.
66
only acceptable but desirable: her “skin was almost white instead of the reddish tan of
the others; her hair was fine and pale, muscles firm, stomach flat and breasts perfect.”167
Clearly, Teeda is more European and feminine than the rest of the tribe, which appears
Native American or Asian and brutish. Furthermore, Rena continues, “her small oval face
was a flower, blushing the rose pink of her out-thrust nipples, [while] . . . her eyes, which
were deeply blue, danced with a light of intelligence.”168 Not only does she have the
lightest skin, Teeda is the most intelligent of the hippies. Of course, based on the obvious
racial cues, Dorian notices her natural superiority. Was this Rena exploiting the likely
assumption of European exceptionalism among her readers, which would allow them to
connect to the hero of the story, or is she proclaiming her desire for the triumph of white
supremacy, even in outer space? Either way, Rena invokes racially charged language.
Throughout the novel, Rena appears uneasy with the myth of the American Wild
West. Despite describing herself as cowgirl and writing for Hollywood where the
Western was a popular genre, throughout the book she seems to oscillate on the Wild
West motif. Furthermore, Vale’s third-person format leaves the reader unsure if she is
being facetious or earnest, making it difficult to know her true feelings on the iconic
myth. For example, after the hero becomes embroiled in the affairs of aliens, he asks,
“Did the strong and virile men of the American old West ever doubt the rightness of
white Yankees in pushing westward to the Pacific Ocean? ... History recorded the deeds
167
Vale, Taurus Four, 42.
168
Ibid.
67
of the strong, not of the weaklings who fell by the wayside.”169 Along with Dorian, the
narrator seems to be struggling with the morality of conquest. Seemingly, in frustration,
the narrator ponders the Darwinian morality of taking land and resources from other
people or planets. Yet Dorion/Rena declares unequivocally, “Earth should be built up so
that it could crush all other civilizations. The needs and desires of Earth were right; there
were no other rights. Earth’s warships and weapons and regimented soldiery must be
perfected and kept in condition to enforce those rights.”170 Ironically, the hero evidently
is willing to rationalize his civilization’s actions in ways similar to those used by
Communists to justify their own imperialism and violation of human rights. But then, as
the author had noted earlier, Taurus Four represented a society overtaken with MarxistLeninist ideas—communal property, lack of individual rights, and absolute devotion to
one leader. This possibly explains her hero’s growing apprehension towards this myth on
two grounds: opposition to Communism and opposition to the Western myth that
similarly justified imperialism and the destruction of individual rights for the greater
good of the state or nation. Dorian/Vale may have noted a similarity between Manifest
Destiny and Marxist conviction that the triumph of the proletariat was inevitable. Both
justified imperialism and repression in the name of a future millennium.
Another example of the Wild West metaphor occurs early in the novel when Vale
likens colonizing planets to that of historical conquest. She explains that “like the
aggressors in the Old West in America, Mankind took land and the resources . . . [it]
169
Vale, Taurus Four, 123.
170
Ibid.
68
wanted, irrespective of needs of weaker populations.”171 She added that the invaders
frequently annihilated the resistors. But, of course, the defenders might triumph and the
would-be conquerors might die. Revealing her deep scorn for intellectuals, she noted that
supposedly “soft-hearted scientists” ended wars of conquest.172 In reality, Vale preferred
to believe that strong nations with manly armies played a more decisive role in
determining the outcome of wars.
Published in 1970, Vale’s final science fiction novel was The Day After
Doomsday, which tells the story of fifteen Americans kidnapped by a team of alien
scientists a moment before a nuclear explosion would have killed them. In order to teach
them how to start over after a massive calamity, the scientists then take the fifteen
individuals 50,000 years back in time, just before a previous cataclysm had shattered the
world. The extraterrestrials plan to take the group back to the day after the nuclear
Armageddon so that they might begin a new society. This story, Rena’s most complex
work, ties together multiple storylines, but unlike her previous two works, this novel
lacks a clear protagonist. Osta Eisen, introduced thirty-four pages into the book,
constitutes the closest approximation of a main character. She is an elderly GermanAmerican woman with a dominating personality, who had a habit of barking orders and
bullying people around.176 Rena may have written Osta to reflect her own assertive
persona. A plot twist reveals that Osta descended from the race of alien scientists and has
171
Vale, Taurus Four, 21.
172
Ibid.
69
developed the ability to use their highly advanced technology and their keen mental
powers. These traits make Osta the logical leader of the earthlings.
Of the themes present in the novel, nuclear Armageddon is the most prevalent.
The novel’s story revolves around a war that could not be averted between the United
States and China. Although both sides engage in bombastic warmongering, the general
population had grown complacent and ignored the dangerous signs of imminent war.
Indeed, notes Rena, “the thunder of exhortations by leaders on both sides had [recently]
taken on a more serious rumble, and there were indications that the rifts within the longsplintering Red-bloc were healing.”173 In sum, she adds, “the scales were tipping and the
‘kissing’ had stopped” between America and her communist enemies.174 In the turmoil
the day the war starts, people waiting at O’Hare Jetport, a futuristic airport, hear a rumor
that the United States and Chinese governments had ended diplomatic relations and are
engaging in war. Vale writes, “Against this onslaught of rumor was a wall of disbelief,
the hope by which people had sustained themselves ever since Hiroshima.”175
Following the atomic holocaust in 1945, the author laments, the American people
had allowed nuclear war preparedness systems to fall into disrepair. This included bomb
shelters, Civil Defense plans, and anti-ballistic missile technology.176 Vale may have
been expressing her acute anxiety that the United States had been deceived into lowering
173
Vale, The Day After Doomsday, 53.
174
Ibid.
175
Ibid., 22.
176
Vale, The Day After Doomsday, 22.
70
its guard by the Nixon Administration, which at the time of the novel’s publication was
beginning to implement a policy of rapprochement with the People’s Republic of China,
Red China controlled by the Communist Party.177 Surely, Vale felt extremely disdainful
of the attempts to establish diplomatic relations with the communist nation—the mortal
enemy of the United States, and no doubt she feared that its cordial mood toward China
was misguided and would leave America dangerously unprepared for a war with the
Sleeping Dragon.
In Kessler’s précis of The Day After Doomsday, she writes, “In an alternative
near-future, after a nuclear disaster caused by Sino-American differences, a kidnapped
select group, returned to an earlier doomsday, must rebuild a cooperative, egalitarian,
life-conserving society.”178 Her summary focuses on the positive goals reflected in the
book’s position within the utopian science fiction tradition. The group was to return to
their original time so that humans could rebuild on the ashes of the old, avoiding the
mistakes of the extinct civilizations. However, Rena was a fierce anticommunist, a
devout pessimist, and hence the doomsday she foretold represented a logical conclusion
to current events. While Rena may have hoped for a better future, she could only envision
it after a nuclear war. She could not hope for a mythical force to rescue humanity from
itself. Hope resided only within this doomsday scenario.
177
Rick Perlstein, Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (New York:
Scribner, 2008), 132-33, 569.
178
Kessler, 279.
71
Like most post-war anti-communists, Vale displays an ardent hostility towards
academics. In the near future of The Day After Doomsday, she has scholars supporting
communist China against the Unites States. The academics seem addle-brained, naïve,
and blinded to true reality by their servility to theoretical constructs. Dr. Sylvester
Markham, LL.D., Ph.D., a prominent figure in the novel, exemplifies the intellectual
bewitched by Marxist doctrine. “[L]ike most of academia, [he] had been outspoken in
support of the country which had squared off as Number One enemy of the United
States.”179 Indeed, Vale opines, “The sophisticated attitude of the time,” moving beyond
mere criticism directed at America, “was one of frank friendship with the Enemy.”180 In
a lively group discussion following the introduction of Dr. Markham in the story, he and
his peers demonstrate no more than superficial understanding of the conflict between the
United States and Communism. The perfidious professors deride the United States and its
allies as “fascists” and “imperialists” but reveal vast admiration for communists and their
fellow-travelers.181 The treasonous conclave of savants ultimately ends up endorsing war
against the United States. The one colleague who questions this logic, a Dr. Howard
McMillan, is shouted down for questioning their cant and their clichés. McMillan exudes
calm and logic when compared to the emotional and nearly incoherent braying supported
by the bulk of academics.
179
Vale, The Day After Doomsday, 53.
180
Ibid.
181
Ibid., 54-55.
72
After spending the better part of the 1960s observing and reporting on the campus
turmoil at Berkeley, Rena doubtlessly used her fictional account to lacerate and denounce
the students and professors that daily preached in favor of civil rights, women’s rights,
the end to the Vietnam War, and for unrestricted free speech on campus. In The Day
After Doomsday, her intense antipathy for the protestors and their message is evident in
her scathing portrayal of professors as deluded and easily duped by foreign governments.
In fact, their education seems to make them that much more receptive to communist
deceptions.
Osta’s dominant personality suffuses everything she does in the novel, pushing
aside what she deems unimportant. She deprecates her family, which includes a husband,
children, and grandchildren. Her children are “toys” who grew up to have “minds of their
own” and are “annoying.”182 Osta concedes to have taken a husband, “a necessary
nuisance,” only because society demands it, not because she loves the man.183 Rena, in
fact, has Osta, a baker, remorselessly poison her husband “as a fitting punishment for”
altering her mother’s muffin recipe.184 If Rena had a female character die for love in The
Red Court, feminist ideas may have now influenced Rena into seeing her gender as better
off without men. Or, perhaps, at seventy years of age, she may have simply being
crowing about her long, successful life without a husband. In this sense, Osta murdering
182
Vale, The Day After Doomsday, 93.
183
Ibid., 92-93.
184
Ibid., 93.
73
her husband may have simply been a literary tool to explain that women may do just fine
without a man in their lives.
Osta reunites with her supposedly deceased mother, the only true love in her life,
after the aliens bring the group back in time. Osta in fact keeps her stranded fellow timetravelers alive by scrupulously following her austere mother’s instructions. Rena writes
that Osta’s German mother “had helped to bring the Sudeten community in which she
lived through a crisis… in the 1920’s, when the twin curses of inflation and indemnities
were grinding [her fellow Germans] into abject poverty.”185 The mother “taught her
neighbors long-forgotten crafts that helped them to self-sufficiency and more comfortable
living.”186 While the location is Central Europe, the cure for economic depression is selfreliance and hard work. While Rena seemingly had supported the New Deal in the mid
thirties, her novel now concludes that the only true panacea for an economic depression is
individual initiative.
The novel ends with Osta’s group heading off to the time right after the nuclear
war, intent on creating a new society out of the rubble and chaos of a devastated planet.187
Despite the daunting challenge of the future, the tale concludes on an optimistic note that
mankind will be able to cleanse itself utterly of collectivist ideas and communist
impulses. In the New Order, society will revere robust individualism and promote
personal uplift. Limited government and laissez faire will be embraced universally.
185
Vale, The Day After Doomsday, 93.
186
Ibid.
187
Ibid., 156-59.
74
The nuclear holocaust in the novel serves as Rena’s portent of the irrepressible
conflict brewing in a bi-polar world divided between communist and anticommunist
governments. Her United States had neglected to prepare for the inevitable doom.
Obeisance to the welfare state had replaced the veneration of American individualism—
in Vale’s view a truly moribund idea. Desperate to ignite a spark of resistance to
collectivism, Vale uses science fiction to warn Americans of the dire threat to their
nation’s very existence. Ironically, her dim view of humanity leads her to the conclusion
that perhaps only nuclear obliteration can bring about a better world. The cost might
appear stunningly excessive, but “dead is always better than Red.”
Rena’s science fiction portrays the human species as easily manipulated prey for
demagogues and parasites. Yet, because of the noble actions of special individuals, all of
her stories carry a message of hope. Minus these heroic individuals, people—like
lemmings—meekly follow despots and criminals. These unique leaders were not
necessarily well trained, or if they were educated, their education often served as an
impediment. Vale, then, celebrates the common man over the elite, and especially honors
individuals striving to make themselves better without relying on government assistance.
In each of the three novels, the collective society acts poorly but heroic individuals step
up to save the day.
In support of this latter idea, Rena always portrays the communists as winning
political power, but their success is ephemeral, as they sow the seeds of their own
ultimate demise. In Beyond the Sealed World, Soviet-style scientific management causes
the world to crumble. In Taurus Four, Soviet-like gender relations produce a major crisis
75
in masculinity but the hero finds salvation by marrying a feminine woman. In The Day
After Doomsday, the People’s Republic of China uses nuclear weapons to triumph over
the United States, but presumably out of the radiated ashes arises a newly perfected
capitalistic phoenix. All three scenarios represent the horrific disaster Rena predicts for
America: a communist victory, and which she would battle against valiantly as a
legislative investigator.
76
Chapter 4
THE BAY AREA INDEX
CUAC
California experienced a short-lived Red Scare from 1939 to 1943.188 It came
soon after Culbert Olson’s election as the state’s first Democratic governor in the
twentieth century, and it was fanned largely by conservative Democratic Assemblymen in
the Legislature who feared that the new governor would foist the entirety of the New
Deal on California. Sympathetic Republicans joined right-wing Democrats in searching
for evidence of a Communist conspiracy to radicalize the Golden State. Notably, the two
men most responsible for the legislature’s political inquiries hailed from Los Angeles, the
state’s largest city and a most powerful magnet for migrants from all over the world.
Assemblymen Jack Breckenridge Tenney and Sam Yorty, themselves natives of the
Midwest, belonged to the region’s volatile political culture that harbored—at one side of
the spectrum—a legion of active communists, socialists, and liberals, while at the other
side—a passel of libertarians, conservatives, and anticommunists.189
Heale, McCarthy’s America, 8, 94. The first Red Scare in California lasted from 1939, when
the Legislature banned the CPUSA from the ballot, to the CUAC’s first published report in 1943. The
heated political battle pitted anti-New Deal conservatives against pro-New Deal liberals, best represented
by Governor Olson. For a discussion of the embattled Governor Olson, see Robert E. Burke, Olson’s New
Deal for California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1953).
188
M. J. Heale, “Red Scare Politics: California's Campaign against Un-American Activities, 19401970,” Journal of American Studies, 20, no. 1 (April, 1986): 7, 10; Heale, McCarthy’s America, 284. Heale
has written the only full treatment of CUAC. The newly opened Records of the California Un-American
Activities Committee at the California State Archives call for historians to reinvestigate the issue but most
of Heale’s conclusions will likely stand.
189
77
Like Rena Vale, both Tenney and Yorty had espoused left-wing views and had
been supporters of the New Deal. But with the advent of a large and influential bloc of
Southern Democrats in the late 1930s—so called “Okies” and “Arkies,” many politicians
from Southern California began to moderate their commitment to FDR and the welfare
state he represented. Some even bolted from the Democratic Party for the GOP. The new
political calculus turned Tenney and Yorty against Governor Olsen and increasingly
against President Roosevelt. Tenney ran as a Republican in 1944, but Yorty remained in
the bosom of the Democratic Party for the next three decades. The future chair of the
Legislature’s investigative committee, Hugh Burns, from Fresno, also morphed from a
New Deal Democrat into a communist hunter, although he too never publicly broke with
the Democratic Party and kept his disagreements private, unlike Tenney.190
The short-lived pre-War Red Scare materialized from the same perennial
contentions that had characterized California’s long history of anti-labor paranoia. Since
the 1870s, Kearneyites, Anarchists, Wobblies, Socialists, Bolsheviks, and Sinclairites had
provoked near hysteria, bloody violence, and draconic extra-legal measures of various
sorts among Californians. Because the New Deal had given labor a license to organize
unions and bargain collectively, conservatives quickly alleged that Communist leaders
had taken charge of the workers and were preparing them for the impending delivery of
the state to the international Communist movement. Rumors circulated freely throughout
190
Hugh Burns, interview by James H. Rowland, Sacramento, CA, September 26, 1977, transcript,
“Legislative and Political Concerns of the Senate Pro Tem, 1957-1970,” California Legislative Leaders,
vol. II, “Governmental History Documentation Project: Goodwin Knight/ Edmund Brown, Sr. Era,”
California State Oral Histories, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, 74.
78
the 1930s that radicals stood behind the decade’s rash of industrial and farm strikes (far
more in California than anywhere else in the country). In sum, as Ingrid W. Scobie
writes, “The ideas, concerns, and political antagonisms which revolved around the illdefined problem of Communism took shape from knowledge and rumors about
Communist infiltration into agricultural labor, industrial labor unions, and even the state
government.”191 For thirty years, the California State Legislature’s un-American
activities investigations would set out to explore the exact nature of this infiltration by
Reds.
In February 1940, the lawmakers in Sacramento formed a committee to
investigate the State Relief Agency (SRA).192 Governor Olsen had sought increased funds
for the SRA but Republicans and anti-SRA Democrats like Yorty and Tenney dominated
the Legislature. Yorty, among those who “had recently become convinced that
Communists were exerting influence in the SRA,”193 boasted that he would “produce
former members of the Communist Party who will testify as to their ‘friends’ in the
SRA.”194 After a hearing in Stockton, the committee drafted a report that accused the
Ingrid Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney: Molder of Anti-Communist Legislation in California,” (PhD
diss., University of Wisconsin, 1974), 20. The dissertation covers Tenney’s life and anticommunism in the
State Legislature from 1939 to 1950. Scobie published a shortened version of this work: “Jack B. Tenney
and the “Parasitic Menace”: Anti-Communist Legislation in California 1940- 1949,” The Pacific Historical
Review 43, no. 2 (May, 1974): 188-211.
191
192
Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney,” 55.
193
Ibid.
Sacramento Bee, February 2, 1940, quoted in Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney: Molder of AntiCommunist Legislation in California,” 56.
194
79
governor of allowing Communists into the SRA and also urged the entire Legislature to
investigate the Communist menace throughout the state.195
Scobie notes that “the fears and suspicions which the hearings awakened both
among the legislators and among the general public facilitated the creation of the first
Un-American Activities Committee in 1941.”196 Although she avoids labeling the brief
legislative outburst a Little Red Scare, she recognizes that popular fears against
communism had reached a fevered pitch by 1940. The new investigative body, officially
known as the Joint Fact Finding Committee on Un-American Activities in California,
would be commonly called the Tenney Committee between 1942 and 1949.
By 1941, Assemblyman Tenney had embarked on his crusade against
Communism in earnest—a crusade he continued to dominate after he moved from the
Assembly to the Senate the following year. Unlike the Yorty Committee that only looked
for communists employed by the state, Tenney’s Star Chamber diligently examined
subversives throughout the state and in a variety of areas. Rena Vale joined Tenney as an
investigator soon after the formation of CUAC, offering her services and expertise as a
former communist. But neither she nor Richard E. Combs, the chief investigator from
1940 until 1969, prevented Tenney from putting his zealous stamp on the committee,
even though Combs may have “exerted a moderating influence”197 Tenney’s pugnacious
195
Heale, “Red Scare Politics,” 12.
196
Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney,” 58.
197
Edward L. Barrett, Jr., The Tenney Committee (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1951), 18.
Barrett’s monograph remains the authoritative work on the committee’s operation under Tenney, although
80
personality and abrasive interrogation style came to define the committee. Whether
badgering witnesses or alerting California to the lurking evil of Communism in the press,
Tenney “was in a very real sense the committee.”198 Indeed, the committee would issue
biennial reports until its termination in 1970; Tenney personally wrote all five reports
issued under his leadership.
The Tenney Committee remained in existence until the Legislature turned against
its chairman, who became increasingly belligerent and obnoxious. Even fellow
anticommunists, including Sam Yorty, grew tired of Tenney’s grandstanding.199 When
leadership of the committee fell to Senator Hugh Burns in 1949, the tone of the
committee changed, and Combs assumed a more important role. The chief investigator,
for example, would now write the biennial reports. In 1953, CUAC ceased having
hearings, because Burns concluded they did not serve any purpose. “People engaged in
subversive activity,” he later recalled, “were inclined to use the committee as a sounding
board for their own ideas, . . . and we never got anything definite out of them.” 200 He
remembered too that when the committee questioned subpoenaed witnesses, they
“refused to answer, and they used all excuses they could to avoid any testimony in
Barrett did not hide his contempt of CUAC or Tenney. Scobie’s work fills in the gaps left by Barrett,
particularly a discussion of Tenney’s anticommunist bills.
198
Barrett, 17.
199
Scobie, “Jack B. Tenney,” 251.
200
Hugh Burns, interview by James H. Rowland, Sacramento, CA, August 16, 1977, transcript,
“Legislative and Political Concerns of the Senate Pro Tem, 1957-1970,” California Legislative Leaders,
vol. II, “Governmental History Documentation Project: Goodwin Knight/ Edmund Brown, Sr. Era,”
California State Oral Histories, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, 54.
81
regards to their activities.”201 Hence, whereas the Tenney Committee engaged in an
aggressive hunt for “un-Americans” using a variety of techniques, the Burns Committee
exhibited much less tenacity in pursuing Communists, relying instead on newspapers and
other forms of second-hand information, rather than on field operatives (except
occasionally) and testimony.
Senator Burns presented a variation of anticommunist politicians. Unlike Yorty or
Tenney, Burns neither broke with President Roosevelt nor adopted partisan politics. He
appeared to have become the chair of the committee “with the understanding that its
methods would be improved.”202 The committee no longer engaged in the more notorious
activities that made it infamous, seeming to reflect the new chair’s mentality. Although
definitely conservative leaning, Burns remained a staunch believer in non-partisanship
and made friends in both parties all the while avoiding political battles with other
senators.203 This facilitated Burns’ slow rise to power in the Senate, culminating with him
201
Hugh Burns, interview.
202
Barret, 352.
Burns decried the introduction of internecine partisanship in the Senate. He said, “My advice to
the kids when they come up Sacramento is: Remember your duty is to the people who elected you. Your
first consideration should be your district, then the state, and then, if you want, the welfare of your party.”
Burns, interviewed by Gabrielle Morris, Sacramento, CA, September 26, 1977, transcript, “Legislative and
Political Concerns of the Senate Pro Tem, 1957-1970,” California Legislative Leaders, vol. II,
“Governmental History Documentation Project: Goodwin Knight/ Edmund Brown, Sr. Era,” California
State Oral Histories, California State Archives, Office of the Secretary of State, Sacramento, 31.
203
82
becoming president pro tempore in 1957.204 He maintained this position until a coalition
of partisan Democrats and Republicans finally blocked his reelection effort in 1970.205
By this time, CUAC seemed a relic of the past. Senator James Mills, a liberal
Democrat, ended up with the position of president pro tempore in early 1971, following
two Republicans in quick succession. Mills also inherited the CUAC leadership. A public
battle erupted after Mills discovered his name and those of fellow legislators in the
committee’s files.206 Republican Senators, helmed by Senator H.L. Richardson, fought
back. Richardson’s office promised he would “do everything he can as a legislator to
retain the committee.”207 To break the political impasse, the Senate Rules Committee
compromised by creating the Subcommittee on Civil Disorders and naming the former
FBI agent Senator Dennis E. Carpenter as the chair.208 Governor Reagan said little about
the legislative fight, although in a press conference, he said, “There is nothing changed in
Alvin D. Sokolow and Richard W. Brandsma, “Partisanship and Seniority in Legislative
Committee Assignments: California after Reapportionment,” The Western Political Quarterly 24, no. 4
(December, 1971): 746-47.
204
205
The 1967 Senate had twenty-two new members out a body of forty Senators. Reflecting the
popular mood, these new legislators introduced a new partisanship to the Senate. Three years later, Burns
could no longer hold together his centrist coalition. Sokolow and Brandsma, 755-756. Burns—like Pat
Brown, Goodwin Knight, and Earl Warren—subscribed to a long tradition of nonpartisanship in
government that dates back to Hiram Johnson in 1910.
206
Sacramento Bee, March 12, 1971.
207
H. L. Richardson quoted in Sacramento Bee, March 12, 1971.
208
Sacramento Bee, March 17, 1971. This committee is still restricted by the Senate Rules
Committee as of this writing and has received virtually no attention—scholarly or otherwise. The new
committee focused primarily on prison riots and gangs spreading throughout California in the early 1970s.
The committee did not appear to consider any of these developments the work of a foreign power.
83
the climate today,” that warranted ending the committee.209 Aware of the public’s waning
obsession with domestic Communism as a popular political issue, the avid anticommunist
governor refused to enter the battle over CUAC investigations, saying, “That’s a matter
for the legislature to settle.”210 Thus not even the standard bearer of the New Right could
save the committee, a politically unpopular vestige of anticommunism from before World
War II.
CUAC and Rena in the 1960s
Rena Vale’s contribution to CUAC has thus far escaped scholarly attention.
Despite all of her work, she remains hidden from public awareness, leaving a gap in fully
understanding how the “little Dies Committee” operated and what happened in the
committee throughout its turbulent existence, especially as the 1960s dawned and a new
era began in the United States—one marked by increasing radicalism. Despite her silent
contributions from the shadows, she helped mold the committee’s direction in its
formative years and throughout its final decade. Turning to her final involvement with
CUAC, her contributions during the sixties evolved from secretary to report writer, as she
played an increasingly more important role on the committee’s staff.
Although Rena rejoined CUAC initially to organize portions of the committee’s
files, she quickly assumed a larger role within the committee. Combs secured her
employment sometime during 1961 or early 1962 to perform clerical work—the creation
of multiple indices on HUAC resistors from the 1950s (mostly on a man named Frank
209
Ronald Reagan quoted in San Francisco Chronicle, March 17, 1971.
210
Ibid.
84
Wilkinson) and Berkeley peace groups from the early 1960s, based on files already in the
committee’s control.211 However, by 1963, she started tracking San Francisco-based civil
rights activists and UC Berkeley student radicals in index form before switching into a
report format, titled the Bay Area Reports (BAR).211 Her meticulously organized catalog
cards and reports updated Combs and the legislative membership on each suspected
subversive’s daily travails. She focused entirely on the San Francisco or Bay Area in
Northern California, an area long known for its tumultuous politics. Though her initial
duties may have been limited officially to clerical work, she left her personal imprint on
the papers and index cards she typed, categorized, and archived. 212
Rena’s most prominent index contains insight into her approach to Communism
throughout the 1950s and 1960s and serves as a template for her later work with the
committee. She compiled information on potential subversives according to their
affiliations, their companions, and their rhetoric. Her other work follows this model. The
minutia forming the heart of her data base suggests that Rena fixated on the notion that
someone could be un-American based solely on their associations and the affinity of their
Rena M. Vale to Mary Albright, June 14, 1969, Box 69, “expenses” folder, Records of CUAC.
In 1977, Burns responded with confusion when asked by the interviewer James H. Rowland about Rena
Vale’s work in the 1960s. He seemed to confuse her work in the 1940s with her 1960s work. He said,
“Rena never worked for the committee when I was chairman…. She might have been on the payroll as a
consultant [in 1967], or something like that. But that was ten years ago or better, and I can't remember what
she finally—.” Hugh Burns, interview by James H. Rowland, 55.The interviewer changed subjects from
Rena Vale. This suggests that Rena worked for Combs, not Burns.
211
Unfortunately, the condition of the committee’s records at the State Archives obstructs a clear
understanding of Rena’s work. The original files she indexed no longer exist in the committee records.
Additionally, the committee did not preserve the initial order or the integrity of her every index. In another
loss, of the original nine BARs, numbered three through seven survive, the rest are perhaps lost forever.
Rena M. Vale to Mary Albright, June 14, 1969, Box 69, “expense” file, Records of CUAC.
212
85
ideas to those espoused by anyone remotely affiliated with the Party. What did this mean
for CUAC? Likely, Rena’s arrangement of the information influenced the views and
operations of CUAC more so than Combs or Burns, who retreated to the shadows while
her yeoman work preserved and amplified the committee’s legacy. Whatever her actual
influence, both praised her work for the committee. Burns writes, “Although many
people do not know of your contribution, the whole state has benefitted by it.”213 Combs,
with whom Rena especially worked closely, adds, “She is made of exceedingly stern
stuff, and I would like to see any of her former comrades get flitsy [sic] with Rena.”214
Before moving on to the examination of her index cards, a brief note exploring the
condition of the collection might assist future researchers in their approach to CUAC.
Rena created all of her indices on three by five cards after joining CUAC, and she
maintained the system until she left the investigative office; she transcribed the contents
of various files onto index cards and in 1963 began a new series of cards noting recent
developments. She added descriptive content to the cards from files that spanned 1954 to
1960 and in 1963 began adding current events to her indices. Ultimately, she created one
major index that included the committee files, Bay Area events from 1963 to 1964, and
early Bay Area Report (BAR) references and a complete index of the 1967 Report, the
only committee report to list Rena as a staff member—possibly indicating that she served
an important role in writing the second-to-last report. Rena produced approximately fifty
CUAC.
213
Hugh M. Burns to Rena M. Vale, November 18, 1970, file 68/1, Records of CUAC.
214
Richard Combs to Betty Neilson, memorandum, February 6, 1962, file 67/1, Records of
86
thousand of the CUAC collection’s 125,000 index cards.215 She switched formats as civil
disorder spread throughout the Bay Area in 1965
The index contains several unofficial categories. First, the single largest collection
of names came from the Committee of First Amendment Defendants (C.F.A.D.) and the
Citizens Committee to Preserve American Freedoms (C.C.P.A.F.) and consisted of
addressed envelopes obtained by the committee in 1961 that Beacon Press had shipped to
Frank Wilkinson—it seems that the committee ended up with the names as potential
communists.216 These two organizations contributed up to 17,000 names to the index
cards in 1961. The second category, similar to the first, included the names of individuals
and groups involved in Un-American committee resistance. Frank Wilkinson, the
C.F.A.D., the C.C.P.A.F., and several other HUAC resistors contributed the bulk of the
names. These cards encompass the period from 1954 until 1963.217 The Berkeley Peace
Center files from 1960 to 1963 marked the provenance of the third category of index
cards, while African-American civil rights protests in the Bay Area between 1962 and
1964 generated the fourth category. The Free Speech Movement that emerged in 1964
215
Index of the Records of the California Senate Fact-Finding Sub-Committee on Un-American
Activities, Records of CUAC.
“Beacon Press,” 1961, Box 59, Records of CUAC. Rena recorded five thousand names from
envelopes from the Committee of First Amendment Defendants and twelve thousand from the Citizens
Committee to Preserve American Freedoms. Wilkinson received the original envelopes, which are not in
the collection.
For the purposes of this essay, the format for the index cards will be to list the card’s subject (a
person or a group) followed by the citation’s date on the card. Names in the index appear in all capital
letters. This paper will list the names so indexed, with the first letter capitalized and the rest in lower case.
Because the index cards lack consistent grammar and punctuation, this paper will add or correct
punctuation when this helps to foster clarity.
216
217
In June 1961, the FBI stole C.F.A.D. files from its headquarters and Vale likely worked on
these files. Robert Sherrill, First Amendment Felon: The Story of Frank Wilkinson, His 132,000 Page FBI
File and His Epic Fight for Civil Rights and Liberties (New York: Nation Books, 2007), 267.
87
comprised the fifth category of cards. In 1967, Rena also fashioned a card file to
chronicle daily events during the tumultuous fall semester at the University of California
at Berkeley.
Because she no doubt viewed the Bay Area as an epicenter of subversive activity,
Rena tracked daily Bay Area developments on her trusty index cards. One category of
cards, created after 1962, cited newspapers and other print sources, relying extensively on
the San Francisco Chronicle, the San Francisco Examiner, and the Oakland Tribune but
also noting other sources such as Tocsin, the anti-communist newspaper, and The Daily
Californian, the UC Berkeley. Occasionally, Rena would mention other sources, such as
pamphlets, petitions, and television news productions.
Frank Wilkinson
Despite the large volume of cards in the C.F.A.D. and C.C.P.A.F. files, the
information indexed does not contribute to the historian’s understanding of either
anticommunism or California in the 1960s. The cards simply note the mailing addresses
taken from the Beacon Press’ list of individuals who might be persuaded to contribute
money toward combating the formation of inquisitorial legislative committees that
threatened the civil liberties of Americans. Frank Wilkinson and other liberal
sympathizers had initially generated the Beacon list from two groups (C.F.A.D. and
C.C.P.A.F.) formed to protect the First Amendment and assist individuals prosecuted for
88
exercising their basic rights, particularly by HUAC and its state clones. 218 If the
voluminous number of cards drawn strictly from the mailing list proves of little value to
scholars, Rena Vale considered them significant to her work..
Rena, as well as the rest of CUAC, felt that indexing the names contributed to
understanding the Communist menace. One can only wonder how much value Rena
found in transcribing as many as seventeen thousand names from envelopes onto her
three by five index cards. Rena received the “names of persons who ordered Beacon
books by mail, particularly those of Paul Blanshard advertised in Harpers, Atlantic, and
Saturday Review . . . : American Freedom and Catholic Power, 2nd ed., and God and Man
in Washington).”219 However, not Communist Party tracts, the two anti-Catholic screeds
expressed a scurrilous hostility toward traditional religion. As for Beacon Press, Vale
concluded that the publisher’s 1959 fall catalogue “shows a decidedly liberal trend with
such authors as (Albert) Schweitzer, (Lewis) Mumford, (Andre) Malraux, --- Buckmaster
[possibly Buckminster Fuller], etc.”220 These authors’ may not have toed the Moscow
line, but she viewed their liberal or socialist ideas as weakening the nation’s anti-
218
The thirty-seven HUAC resistors that C.F.A.D. supported were: Edwin Alexander, Lloyd
Barenblatt, Carl Braden, Dr. H. Chandler Davis, Hugo Gregory, Dr. Bernhard Deutch, Rev. Theodore R.
Gibson, Mrs. Mary Knowles, Robert Lehrer, Herman Liveright, Rev. A. Leon Lowry, Victor Malis, Arthur
McPhaul, Harvey O’Conner, Martin Popper, William Price, Paul Rosenkrantz, Norton Russell, Alfred J.
Samter, Peter Seeger, Robert Shelton, Bernard Silber, Elliot Sullivan, Sydney Turoff, George Tyne, Dr.
Willoard Uphaus, Mrs. Goldie Watson, Donald C. Wheeldin, Alden Whitman, Frank Wilkinson, Edward l.
Yellin, and “no. 37 is Sydney Ingerman with case discarded.” “Committee of First Amendment
Defendants,” n.d., Records of CUAC.
William Price to Committee of First Amendment Defendants coordinators, “Beacon Press,”
June 15, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
219
220
“Beacon Press,” fall 1959, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
89
communist resolve.221 No doubt, Vale did not begrudge the countless, mind-numbing
hours spent recording the information. Because her tedious vigilance would help expose
the nation’s enemies, her work should be valued for its patriotic virtue and not for its
clerical drudgery befitting—some would have said—a woman stenographer.
As important as cataloguing liberal reading habits may have been to Rena, the
true target of her scrutiny was Frank Wilkinson, the head of the steering committees of
both the Committee of First Amendment Defendants and the Citizens Committee to
Preserve American Freedoms.222 She and CUAC likely were alerted to Wilkinson by
Richard Combs, who had worked as the chief investigator of a probe into the City of Los
Angeles City Housing Authority and the Los Angeles School Board in the aftermath of
revelations of Wilkinson’s Communist Party ties.223 However, the information Rena
indexed did not mention his connections to either body. Instead, it focused on his other
activities.
Combs compiled files from Wilkinson’s personal correspondence, minutes of the
Los Angeles Unitarian Church, and from various media sources. The most topical
information came from correspondence “with dozens of individuals and organizations”
concerning “abolition” of HUAC and defending those “afoul of the law over refusing to
221
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 91.
222
No one has written a biography of Wilkinson, but two works stand out as essential reading for
understanding the man’s life. The first deals with the FBI’s obsession with Wilkinson and the second
details Wilkinson’s fight in Los Angeles. See Sherrill, First Amendment Felon and Donald C. Parson,
Making a Better World: Public Housing, the Red Scare, and the Direction of Modern Los Angeles
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2005).
223
Heale, “Red Scare Politics,” 27.
90
testify before various bodies of investigation.”224 Rena created ninety index cards on
Wilkinson categorized by topic: fifty-five cards for C.F.A.D., twenty cards on the
Unitarian Church, five cards on an I. F. Stone rally, two cards on C.C.P.A.F., five cards
on a meeting in April 1960, and three cards from miscellaneous stories in 1964. The only
remaining traces of these files are these index cards.
The earliest entries in the index on Wilkinson deal with his work for the Los
Angeles Unitarian Church in 1954. The first index card is a summary of notes he made
while attending the annual business meeting of the Unitarian Fellowship for Social
Justice in Boston. Rena found him to be “particularly active,” especially on resolutions,
but not especially successful in getting them passed.225 The Unitarians voted down one
specific resolution he supported “pertaining to Freedom of Thought and Religion,” but
which Vale interpreted as intended to give greater “freedom . . . [to] the Communist
Party.”226 Wilkinson also voiced his support for a motion protesting the “Decline in Civil
Liberties,” and, as she put it, “again he was slapped down.”227 Following this, “he made
an ill-tempered comment about the ‘hard core of undemocratic and bigoted forces within
the Eastern leadership’ ” of the Church.228 According to Vale, Wilkinson likewise
224
“Wilkinson, Frank - C.F.A.D.,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC.
225
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” May 20-23, 1954, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
226
Ibid.
227
Ibid.
228
Ibid.
91
attended the next annual meeting, monopolizing the discussions on resolutions and again
making few friends.229
While not residing in Boston, Wilkinson—reported Vale—made continuous
attempts at organizing the Unitarian Church against the anticommunist movement and in
support of his political agenda that exposed him as a “fellow traveler.” He favored using
the Church’s mailing list for a fund-raising swim party at Dalton Trumbo’s house.230 He
urged the Unitarian Board of Trustees to send a letter condemning loyalty oaths to the
California State Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Constitutional Freedoms.231
Moreover, Anna Pitney, a fellow Unitarian, wrote him seeking his help after she faced
suspension from federal civil service as a loyalty risk following her attendance of a Paul
Robeson concert.232
Vale next turned from Wilkinson’s Unitarian activities to his work encouraging
resistance to investigative committees, which had prompted HUAC to subpoena him
twice, though he had refused to cooperate, volunteering only his name when
questioned.233 Subsequently, Rena recorded, Wilkinson had sought to “abolish
‘inquisitional committees of congress’” by coordinating support from various national
229
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” May 20-23, 1954, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
230
Ibid., July 26 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
231
Ibid., August, 10 1955,
232
Ibid., November 30, 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
“Wilkinson, Frank – C.F.A.D.,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC. The two times were 1956 in
Los Angeles and 1958 in Georgia.
233
92
organizations.234 Under Wilkinson’s guidance, the C.C.P.A.F. and the ACLU started
working together and created the C.F.A.D in the process. Rena took credit for this latter
development, believing that “no doubt” existed that the “the common danger of being
judged for defying investigative committees looking into Communism… brought about
formation of the C.F.A.D,”—[together with] “the restless Communists who fear to rely
on ‘fronts’ which have been exposed.”235 She viewed the C.F.A.D. as the refuge of a
desperate Communist Party, proving that constant and intense exposure of Communisttainted individuals and groups worked.
HUAC held public hearings in San Francisco in 1960. Hundreds of students
protested on May 13, increasing to over five thousand the next day. Impressed with the
ardor of the noisy throng that expressed unanimous disdain for HUAC’s assault on civil
liberties, the historian W. J. Rorabaugh writes, “The large turnout showed that the
McCarthy era was over.”236 From a different perspective, the Burns Committee instead
saw “disgraceful student riots,” with the young participants evincing “hatred for all
committees of federal or state legislatures established to ascertain and report on internal
subversion.”237 Rena agreed with the Burns Committee. She also noticed correspondence
involving Wilkinson dated April 28, 1960 that indicated those subpoenaed for the
234
“Wilkinson, Frank – C.F.A.D.,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC.
235
Ibid., January 8, 1957, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
236
W. J. Rorabaugh, Berkeley at War: The 1960s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 16.
237
Senate Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, Eleventh Report of the Senate
Fact-Finding Subcommittee on Un-American Activities, 1961, 9. The committee claimed that this was one
of the many signs of an impending Communist Party resurgence.
93
hearings were meeting together and that they “should be able to do a better job” against
HUAC.238 On May 6, Harvey O’Conner, a HUAC resistor and member of the steering
committee on both C.F.A.D. and C.C.P.A.F., wrote to Wilkinson that Los Angeles and
San Francisco would prove to be a “hornet’s nest” for HUAC, which Rena feared might
potentially be the case, because after all the correspondents had inside knowledge on
Communist strategy and tactics.239 Following the demonstrations, Wilkinson judged the
protestors “magnificent” and admitted that “everything we tried worked.”240 This
concession assumed critical importance for Rena, who had already determined that
Wilkinson was a Communist agent. Although she would have been indexing the letters
after the fact, this exchange between O’Conner and Wilkinson proved unequivocally to
her that the Communists had already infiltrated and indoctrinated the student activists at
Berkeley. Indeed, the May 6 letter would prove to be the smoking gun confirming her
beliefs.
Nevertheless, 1960 saw the “beginning of the end for C.F.A.D.”241 Rena
explained that with their funds nearly dry, “arm waving about the 36 in jail” while in fact
none still were, and personal tensions mounting, Wilkinson started “midwiving another
‘Front.’ ”242 He helped establish the Friends of C.F.A.D., “evidently to mop up the
238
“Wilkinson, Frank – C.F.A.D.,” April 28, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
239
Ibid., May 6, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
240
Ibid., May 18, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
241
Ibid., June 30, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
242
“Wilkinson, Frank – C.F.A.D.,” June 6, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC; “Wilkinson, Frank –
C.F.A.D.,” June 21, 1960, Records of CUAC.
94
failure” of the previous group.243 Additionally, Wilkinson also helped to establish the
National Committee to Abolish the Un-American Activities Committee. Rena noticed
that even as HUAC and other investigatory agencies focused attention on what she
deemed Communist-dominated groups, the “Communists” would jump onto another
group, even if the names were not especially different. During the following years, Rena
tracked Wilkinson through newspaper accounts. The Ohio State University barred him
from speaking in December 1962.244 He then appeared and possibly spoke at a W. E. B.
DuBois Club meeting, a student group connected to the CPUSA.245 The final index card
indicated that Wilkinson adopted a “new line” when he advocated outlawing “reprinting
government reports exposing Communist activities.”246
In possession of correspondence that demonstrated that Wilkinson “was the prime
mover” behind both the C.F.A.D. and the C.C.P.A.F, Vale charged that he was an
ambitious and dishonest person who used the work of others to elevate himself. 247 Even
though Wilkinson, Harvey O’Connor, and Carl and Anne Braden started the C.F.A.D.
and, along with William Price by February 1960, formed the coordinating committee,
Rena believed—based on her files that “Price was the figurehead, [and] Wilkinson the
243
“Wilkinson, Frank – C.F.A.D.,” 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
244
“Wilkinson, Frank,” August 6, 1963, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
245
Ibid., April 23, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
246
Ibid., April 10, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC. This was the final entry not the final date.
247
“Wilkinson, Frank - C.F.A.D.,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC.
95
boss.” 248 When the group collectively composed the pamphlet, “Behind the Bars for the
First Amendment,” Wilkinson “modified it in rewriting so that he could claim it was his
work.”249 Rena concluded that Wilkinson thus shaped the group’s single most important
public outreach.
Vale noted that Price in a letter to the other coordinators related an interview with
Beacon Press editor-in-chief Ed Darling,250 who asked Price if the C.F.A.D. had
communist members. In response, the much affronted Price had “put [Darling] in his
place and said just such questions as that was what C.F.A.D. was opposing; Darling
apologized.”251 Outraged, Vale commented that Darling “didn’t press for an answer to the
question” about Communist membership.252 She implied that Beacon Press was no less
guilty of hiding communists by kowtowing to the C.F.A.D. Price refused to answer what
ought to be a mandatory question. For Vale, then, those resisting HUAC continued to
appear ever more guilty of Communist Party affiliation and of hiding behind legal
charades.
Using her index files as evidence, Vale focused attention on the flawed character
of radicals. For instance, she painted Wilkinson as short-tempered and pushy. Two major
incidents stuck out for Rena. One was his treatment of William Price. In 1960, Wilkinson
248
“Wilkinson, Frank - C.F.A.D.,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC.
249
Ibid.
William Price to Committee of First Amendment Defendants coordinators, “Beacon Press,”
June 15, 1960, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
250
251
Ibid.
252
Ibid.
96
pressured Price to convince Beacon Press to hand over the 12,000 names of potential
sympathizers and in the process “displayed the temper we have seen before.”253
Afterward, Price and Wilkinson had a falling out. In response, Anne Braden wrote to the
latter that his letter “was cruel to Bill” and subsequently lashed out against Wilkerson in a
bitter lecture.254 Rena’s reaction was to write that “AGAIN [emphasis original] we meet
the outcropping of viciousness in [Wilkinson].”255 After this letter, the seemingly
contrite Wilkinson admitted he “was guilty of dealing with people as though they were
machines . . . [and] apologizes.”256 However, a short time later, Harvey O’Conner sent a
letter to Wilkinson and the Bradens saying, “I think we can write Bill off.”257 In the end,
Wilkinson broke off his association with Price.
While a member of the Los Angeles Unitarian Church, Wilkinson became
embroiled in a fracas over an “evaluation of the personal situation.”258 For Rena, this
incident again pointed to his blemished character, which together with his “Communist”
ideas made him a repugnant individual. The records are not always clear but the
brouhaha seems to have revolved around Wilkinson calling some staff members, perhaps
“Wilkinson, Frank - C.F.A.D.,” n.d., Box 62, Records of CUAC; “Wilkinson, Frank Inventory,” 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
253
254
“Wilkinson, Frank - C.F.A.D,” April 11, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
255
Ibid.
256
Ibid., April 12, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
257
Ibid., June 30, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” December 19, 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC. Rena
commented that CUAC did not have the minutes for the December 12 meeting.
258
97
including secretaries Mrs. Dawson and Mrs. Mosley, unsuitable and then he and Jean
Koller may have orchestrated the passage of a resolution criticizing them.259 Church
members complained to Wilkinson about his behavior. Rena found Fritzie Siegel’s letter
to him to be furious in “protest[ing] your act of getting Lois (Gardner) out on a limb, then
removing . . . [her] support” at a meeting of the church on December 12.260 Steve
Fritchman wrote in agreement with Wilkinson that the staff was “far from adequate for
our needs… and unaware of the nature of a liberal church,” but that he should have kept
this to himself.261 Fritchman hoped to “patch up the trouble Wilkinson had caused.”262
Rena made no note of any further squabbling.
Jean Koller ignited the late-December controversy, according to Vale, after Koller
“was named to the all important Personnel Committee, and it was her report” on the
“duties of all staff members,” which lead [sic] to the upheaval on the staff. . . [because]
they considered it unfair.”263 Following the December meeting, a regretful Koller wrote
Wilkinson that she felt “stricken” at her own timidity in the meeting and asked if they
could “reconsider our action.”264 Although Vale commented that Wilkinson had
committed an “error and an insult,” she did concede that the CUAC lacked any record of
259
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” December 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
260
Ibid., December 18, 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
261
Ibid., December 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
262
Ibid.
“Koller, Jean,” n.d., Box 61, Records of CUAC; “Koller, Jean,” October 12, 1955, Box 61,
Records of CUAC.
263
264
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” December 19, 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
98
his response, and whether “he apologized or went off in a pout” was unknown.265 Rena’s
last remark particularly dripped with venom. Perhaps his disparagement of professional
women who Rena likely identified with, even if only subconsciously, accounts for her
acute distaste for the radical firebrand.
Jean Koller appears to have fascinated Rena, who took an interest in the
churchwoman’s activities and devoted six cards to her involvement in the Los Angeles
Unitarian congregation in 1955. “[E]xceedingly active,” Koller—Vale pointed out—sat
“on both Board of Trustees and in the Church Council.”266 Yet, the index indicated that
Koller aligned herself with “Wilkinson and that clique,” a damning guilt by association
that ultimately made her undeserving of sympathy.267 Rena summed up Koller’s
importance: “Because of her ‘soft touch’ she is probably the most dangerous; or else she
is a very naïve ‘do-gooder’ whose awakening did not come during the period covered by
the documents at hand.”268 Rena considered Koller a dangerous Lorelei, because her
gender placed her in a good position to seduce others to the bosom of the Communist
Party, or at the very least unwittingly entice others towards good liberal causes and front
groups.
Other of Wilkinson’s fellow-resisters and associates likewise ended up in Rina’s
card file. William Price wrote for the New York Daily News for fifteen years, minus his
265
“Wilkinson, Frank - Unitarian,” December 19, 1955, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
266
Ibid.
267
Ibid.
268
Ibid.
99
World War II service as a Navy pilot, until the paper fired him after the Senate Internal
Security Subcommittee accused him of transporting documents to the Soviets. Vale
concluded that the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee “had good reason to suspect
him” of treasonous conduct.269 Rena found that Price’s correspondence proved that the
journalist needed constant prodding and “flittered around constantly.”270 But not only did
he come off as indecisive and unstable, his “long, emotional letters,” revealed a man who
thought of himself as a “ ‘hard luck’ adventurer.”271 Evicted when city officials
condemned his residence as unsafe, he whined about being a victim and then, in a
“typical Communist” move, protested as the wrecking crew worked.272 Because of his
defective character, he subsequently managed to alienate the rest of the C.F.A.D.’s
steering committee, which ostracized him.
Harvey O’Connor, “the elder statesman” of the C.F.A.D., appeared before Senator
McCarthy’s Senatorial committee because O’Connor’s books had surfaced in the
“overseas libraries of the State Department.”273 Rena explained that O’Connor’s notoriety
was such that she had little reason to add much except to index the relevant files, minus
her usual explanations.274 He later appeared before HUAC at Newark, New Jersey,
269
“Price, William,” 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
270
Ibid.
271
Ibid.
272
Ibid.
273
“O’Connor, Harvey,”1960, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
274
Ibid.
100
battled against HUAC in the Emergency Civil Liberties Committee (ECLC), and then
helped midwife the C.F.A.D. into existence. Again Rena could not resist acerbic
comments regarding her subject’s personal failings, remarking that O’Connor had not
“soiled his hands on any actual work” while dispensing “wit and wisdom” to the
others.275 O’Connor, according to Vale, also displayed a cynical and self-serving attitude
when he fretted how the waning of legal troubles for those who had resisted HUAC
would harm the C.F.A.D. whose entire raison d’etre involved helping those who defied
the investigative committee ameliorate their financial problems. Rather than joyously
celebrating his group’s success, he seemly cared more about the propaganda and financial
value of his organization that persisted in arousing support for the victims of American
society.
O’Connor worked on international monetary appeals, coordinating—for
example—the publication of the C.F.A.D.’s pamphlet in La Razón, “the biggest daily” in
Buenos Aires, and otherwise drawing international attention to the struggle of American
progressives on behalf of civil liberties. [?]276 O’Connor specially aroused Vale’s
attention when he mentioned having an “anarchist-socialist friend” in Buenos Aires, who
had helped C.F.A.D make inroads in Havana. 277 No doubt this would have confirmed
Rena’s notion that communist circles were much more monolithic in their beliefs and
tightly knit in their tactical operations than the American public realized. Indeed, the
275
“O’Connor, Harvey,”1960, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
276
Ibid., April 30, 1960, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
277
Ibid., May 20, 1960, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
101
C.F.A.D. communicated through a network of radical foreigners to influence the closest
Communist government to the United States.
Anne and Carl Braden worked against racial segregation in Kentucky in the
1950s. Their efforts started by helping a black couple move into a lily-white housing
community and ended with Carl Braden sentenced to fifteen years in prison on sedition
charges.278 As prominent progressives, they joined the C.F.A.D. coordinating committee.
While Carl seemly remained in the background character, Vale described Anne as the
group’s “work horse.”279 Impressed with Anne Braden’s letters that “show great ability,
vast energy, and ingenuity,”280 Rena shied away from criticizing Mrs. Braden. The index
includes almost nothing on her. Vale may have felt some kind of a kindred spirit in Anne
and left much blank. Probably, though, she determined that Mrs. Braden was tangential to
Wilkinson’s activities and thus did not merit much attention. Rena’s praise indicated she
viewed Braden as an independent political actor, and as having her own voice. The
historian Catherine Fosl would have agreed with Rena’s assessment, writing that for over
half a century, “Anne Braden. . . [has been] known as one of the most enduring and
reliable of white anti-racist activists.”281
278
“Braden, Carl,” 1960, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
279
“Price, William,” n. d., Box 62, Records of CUAC.
280
“Braden, Anne,” April 11, 1960, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
281
Catherine Fosl, Subversive Southerner: Anne Braden and the Struggle for Racial Justice in the
Cold War South (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2002), xxiii.
102
Berkeley Peace Center
Berkeley, California became the epicenter of the political and social cataclysm
that shook away the smug world of the 1950s and produced the aftershocks that ushered
in the age of Reagan. In the words of the historian W. J. Rorabaugh: “In the sixties
Berkeley was a city at war.”282 The city, dominated by the University of California
campus, simmered and exploded. Blacks, Chicanos, women, anti-war activists, and
various other discontented students grew increasingly militant as the decade progressed.
In a city heretofore dominated by the Old Left of the thirties, the burgeoning groups now
challenged the establishment for a share of the political power.283 Berkeley, unlike any
other place, thus emerged as the locus of Old Left and New Left activists working
together. In fact, according to Rorabaugh, “The result was a peculiar local approach to
politics reminiscent of the Popular Front of the thirties, when communists had sought
power through participation in broad political campaigns.”284 CUAC and Rena
recognized the distinctive alliance, and the specter of the Popular Front clearly haunted
Rena’s observations throughout the decade.
Vale devoted a good deal of attention to radical activities in Berkeley. From
available sources, for instance, she compiled 113 index cards on the Berkeley Peace
Center. As with all of Rena’s index card work drawn from the committee’s own records,
the original files do not exist in the CUAC records at the California State Archives. The
282
Rorabaugh, ix.
283
Ibid., 87-88.
284
Ibid., 90.
103
cards however shed light on the political interests of the CUAC investigators and how
Rena felt about the Peace Center, its leadership, and its members. If the original files
listed only individuals who corresponded with the organization’s various occupants, the
index cards from this series seemingly inscribed the names of anyone who had
connections to the Center. In addition, the files cataloged literature and those groups
affiliated to the Berkeley Peace Center, which Rena believed represented perhaps the
most serious Red threat of all the pre-1964 organizations she had thus far chronicled in
index cards.
Located at 1730 Grove Street in Berkeley, the Peace Center housed multiple
organizations between1960 and 1963, which lacked a central hierarchy.285 Indeed, the
index seems to confirm that the Center constituted an umbrella organization of loosely
affiliated and ephemeral groups. The major goal of the Center from 1960 to 1963
focused on nuclear disarmament and the ending the Cold War.
Vale’s cards depended on materials that must have been gathered haphazardly and
from a source that did not provide suitable context for the documents. In fact, their
provenance may have been a waste bin or an unguarded box within the Center. Rena
admitted the materials were originals from the Grove Street site and were produced by or
meant for “various peace groups,” including “Acts for Peace, Lobby for Peace and the
Peace Centers, as well as numerous organizations such as Committee for Non-Violent
Action, Women for Peace and those at which we can only guess and for uses at which we
285
“Berkeley Peace Center,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
104
can only guess [emphasis added].”286 Even though the material collected from the Center
seemed useful and had to be catalogued, Rena acknowledged that the files failed to
incriminate anyone connected to the umbrella organization. And yet the Center in itself
merited close scrutiny if for no other reason than it was a hotbed of radical activity in one
of the major incubators of subversion in the United States. Clearly, Rena and the CUAC
investigators dreaded the menace that was imperceptible—even in documents. Suspicion
and fear alone were enough to trump probability as a legitimate reason for assembling an
extensive database.
The era’s heightened paranoia sometimes forced Communist hunters into odd
reactions. Learning about a questionnaire circulated by Acts for Peace, Vale wondered
its purpose, though concluding that it likely “originated as a means of obtaining help in
the Peace Centers.”287 But for some unexplained reason, the questionnaire truly got under
Rena’s thin skin and she spewed a barrage of invectives in condemning the group in no
uncertain terms. As for the questionnaire, that probably aimed to do no more than canvass
potential supporters of the peace group on how they might contribute to the organization,
Rena fretted that it would develop into “what appears to be a rather sinister instrument for
obtaining information on presumably innocent persons for the purpose of drawing them
into the Communist orbit.”288 Activists in Acts for Peace seemed intent on using
propaganda to reach as many as possible. She conceded that the group involved contrary
286
“Berkeley Peace Center,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
287
“Berkeley Peace Center c/o Acts for Peace, Summery,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
288
Ibid.
105
elements, finding the “cynical sophistication of Communist activists” combined with an
“incredible naiveté”289—admitting that Communists were guilty of cynical sophistication
while at the same time finding them naïve. Rena complained that Acts for Peace targeted
“innocents” for what might be considered education but was really propaganda, which
included “an 18-page, mimeo declaration on the meaning of Socialism by Erich
Fromm!”290 For Acts for Peace to send out such obvious propaganda clearly marked the
group as stooges who worked, secretly or unknowingly, for Moscow. Nonetheless,
having acquired samples of the responses to the questionnaire, Vale grudgingly expressed
admiration for the group that “show[ed] a thoroughness in obtaining information.”291
The questionnaire asked respondents to list their skills and any other traits that
could be useful for community activism. The group wanted to know things like who
could do office and secretarial work, policy research, coordinate with the Peace Center,
289
“Berkeley Peace Center c/o Acts for Peace, Summery,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
290
Ibid. Erich Fromm was a psychologist and a socialist philosopher. He felt that the United States
achieved the highest standards for humankind but teetered on the brink falling into a black hole of thing
worship—a place where consumerism replaced all other values. “Erich Fromm Interview with Mike
Wallace,” Survival and Freedom, No. 5 (New York: The Fund for the Republic, 1958), 1,
http://www.erich-fromm.de/data/pdf/1958b-e.pdf (accessed November 15, 2009). The 1960 pamphlet “Let
Man Prevail” appears to be the pamphlet Rena wrote about previously. In it, Fromm argued, “capitalism
and a vulgarized, distorted socialism have brought man to the point where he is in danger of becoming a
dehumanized automaton [emphasis original].” Erich Fromm, “Let Man Prevail – A Socialist Manifesto and
Program,” Let Man Prevail: A Socialist Manifesto Program (New York, 1960), 10, http://www.erichfromm.de/data/pdf/1960b-e.pdf (accessed November 15, 2009). This was not the argument of a Moscow
thrall. He spoke disparagingly about falsely labeling someone un-American when they reinterpreted “the
spiritual tradition of radical humanism… to present day society.” Fromm, “Let Man Prevail,” 3. Vale had
no tolerance for such attempts at defaming un-American investigations. While Fromm admitted to being
radical, he publically rejected the Soviet Union. His un-American crime was failing to denounce socialism.
“Erich Fromm Archives and Literary Estate,” http://www.erich-fromm.de/e/index.htm, (accessed
November 15, 2009).
291
“Berkeley Peace Center c/o Acts for Peace, Summery,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
106
and do media and public relations. The survey also requested that respondents indicate if
they could serve as public speakers, discussion leaders, and baby sitters.292 Rena,
seemingly with dismay, exclaimed that most “ ‘prospects’ did, indeed, use another sheet
of paper!”293—indicating a high level of public interest in this potentially subversive
group. Acts for Peace employed many different categories to classify the respondents,
including Jew, Negro, intellectual, and scientist. The organization also classified some
according to areas of interest.294 The CUAC, probably influenced by either Rena or
Combs, decided that the peace group probably meant to use the information from the
questionnaires to organize their volunteers, but that the hard-core communists would seek
to use the data for a more sinister end.
In another section of the index cards, Rena expanded on the threat that Acts for
Peace posed to the country. On sixteen index cards, she detailed the group’s activities
from 1960 until 1963 based on material from their files. The records portrayed a group
involved in an “interdependence and a clumsy conspiracy ” with other groups at the
Berkeley Peace Center.295 Returning to the questionnaire, Vale described it as the
“supreme effort of all activities,” which aided in documenting in “minute geographic
292
“Berkeley Peace Center- Volunteer File Summery,” 1960-61, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
293
Ibid.
294
Ibid.
“Acts for Peace, 1960-1961 Records,” n. d., Box 66, Records of CUAC. The CUAC records
give no reason for splitting the index of Acts for Peace and the Berkeley Peace Center between different
boxes.
295
107
districts” the respondents’ listed addresses “for personal contact of individuals,
obviously.”296 After this, she issued her strongest condemnation of the survey:
While it may have been conceived as purely utilitarian work…, it was something
along the line contorted into a rather sinister instrument to provide information for
recruitment into the Communist Party. For that reason, we feel it is important to
card all those “innocents” and to provide information which they volunteered
about themselves, as well as when and where they were drown into the “peace
movement” in so far as ascertainable. No doubt the file entitled Key Areas
(contacts under Berkeley Peace Center) provided information as to personnel to
work this fruitful vineyard for purposes no doubt kept secret—and which we can
easily guess.297
She indicted Acts of Peace with endeavoring to use Soviet propaganda to indoctrinate
Bay Area residents with Marxist ideas and firmly believed that those agents of
communism deserved to be identified by the CUAC and their names submitted to state
and federal officials.
Vale found further cause for concern. Even though her assembled records hinted
only at a tenuous link between Acts for Peace and the Communist Party, she concluded
that “the CONSPIRACY [emphasis original] is here—its bare bones sticking out in all
directions.”298 “Certainly,” Rena explained, “the mere groping for methods of achieving
world peace—security from war, death, and destruction—cannot be looked upon as a
conspiracy; it is only…the USE [emphasis original] [of] innocent endeavors which
should concern us.”299 The threat from Acts for Peace came as a dupe of the Communist
296
“Acts for Peace, 1960-1961 Records,” n. d., Box 66, Records of CUAC.
297
Ibid.
298
Ibid.
299
Ibid.
108
movement that would use the idealistic organization to advance its own goal of world
domination. Perhaps suggesting that the Communists had already subverted Acts for
Peace as of 1960, she found that the 441 people on the advisory council included “some
not so innocent.”300 Notwithstanding its laudatory objectives, Acts for Peace—in Rena’s
eyes—harbored too many Communists, or potential Communists, to be trusted. Rena
acknowledged that her distrust of the group came from the ability of Communists to
hijack its laudable work. Clearly, like most anti-communists, she doubted that a group
like Acts of Peace could exist free of CPUSA influence.
For Vale, the questionnaire proved that the Communist Party, working through
other sources, was intent on recording and documenting all areas open to infiltration and
subversion. The survey demonstrated the use of scientific social analysis to effect a wellplanned conquest of America. The questionnaire, a typical Communist subterfuge,
enabled the “Masters of Deceit” to probe an organization’s structure and identify those
most vulnerable as targets of recruitment.
From the meeting minutes of the Lobby for Peace (a group located at the Berkeley
Peace Center), Rena recorded the activities of Dr. Robert Shultz. On March 20, 1960,
Shultz met with Acts for Peace. They agreed to bylaws and then to hire him as a
Washington, D.C “citizens’ lobbyist for peace and disarmament.”301 Soon after, Shultz
urged the United States to recognize Red China and destroy its own nuclear missile
300
“Acts for Peace, 1960-1961 Records,” n. d., Box 66, Records of CUAC.
301
“Shultz, Dr. Robert,” March 20, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
109
stockpiles.302 Aware of the radical nature of the proposals, the group soon speculated,
perhaps facetiously, if writing President Dwight Eisenhower and Premier Nikita
Khrushchev about these topics “would label us … Communist dupes?”303 Undaunted by
the likelihood of earning the stigma of radicalism, Lobby for Peace not only sent off the
letters to the world’s two most powerful men, but it also recommended that Washington
should “deal more leniently and more patiently” with Cuba. After all, it noted, “the
current policy [only] forc[ed] Cuba closer to Russia and China.”304 Shultz sent a letter to
a person named Don Stewart, with the intent of not only “influencing newspapers, radio
stations, [but also] watching and criticizing what they say, writing letters ‘ripping to
shreds’ what they (Lobby for Peace) doesn’t approve, praising, and cooperating with
what they do approve.”305 Because he pushed for a foreign policy that appeased
Communist governments and even allowed them to thrive, Dr. Shultz’s lobbying—in
Rena’s view—presented a danger. And Shultz’s willingness to capitulate in matters of
foreign policy no doubt also signaled a dangerous tolerance of domestic subversion.
While a modern audience might not see how the Berkeley Peace Center could be
a threat, Rena saw the organization’s decentralized structure and squishy liberal doctrines
as the perfect breeding place for Soviet machinations. For twenty years, since 1940, Rena
had operated under the conviction that Communist agents infiltrated the United States
302
“Shultz, Dr. Robert,” April 3, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
303
Ibid., June 8, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
304
Ibid., August 25, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
305
Ibid., June 18, 1960, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
110
with intent of undermining the system she held dear. The activities by groups affiliated
with the Center only seemed to prove further her supposition that the Kremlin’s agents
still actively worked to create a Soviet America through social upheaval. She found the
Peace Center files filled with activists who seemingly strove to destroy the connective
bonds that defined America. The Center itself represented a focal point of ideas
conflicting with a moral, Christian, democratic, capitalist, and consensual society. Rena
worried that the blandishments of foreign agents would particularly resonate among the
callow and naïve, the disaffected and frustrated, and the zealous revolutionary already
sympathetic to the Soviet Union.
It would be easy to fault Rena for failing to see that Acts for Peace was a local
group run by liberal activists and not an arm of Moscow’s intelligence service. After all,
the group failed to achieve national or lasting fame and their peace proposals appeared
too utopian for most Americans. Yet, the group perfectly conformed to what Rena
expected from a Community Party front group. The idea of peace as a political agenda,
for instance, served as a metaphor for capitulating to worldwide Communist Party
dominance. The questionnaire, which ostensibly fostered democratic participation among
the rank and file, would arouse many “peaceniks” to the idea of international peace and
the prospect of the Cold War’s end. Nevertheless, in Vale’s view, international amity
would have benefited the Soviet Union, because only the communists would have been in
a position, through domestic subversion and through diplomatic duplicity to exploit any
peace situation. As in her novels, Rena feared the imminent physical destruction of the
United States, but liberal groups like the Berkeley Peace Center would unwittingly entice
111
volunteers and expose previously unaware citizens to Communist Party indoctrination.
In the end, these recruits—knowingly or not—would participate in the destruction of the
United States.
Acts for Peace highlighted her fears by distributing Erich Fromm’s essay
defending socialism. Even though the index cards do not indicate if Rena actually read
the prominent psychologist’s pamphlet or if she was familiar with Fromm from other
sources, a careful study of Fromm’s work would have revealed that he strongly opposed
the Soviet Union and a dictatorship of the majority, the justification of the Russian police
state.306 Likewise, he adamantly condemned the Communist International. But even if
Vale understood Fromm’s own antipathy toward the U.S.S.R., Rena still would have
agonized that his words would convince numerous Americans of the benign nature of
socialism. Such individuals would not understand the differences between socialism and
communism and would conflate both. The muddling of the two ideologies would
facilitate the triumph of the inevitable socialist revolution and the establishment of a
Soviet state. For the sake of political simplicity, Vale and others who shared her phobia
about Reds chose to define both communists and socialists as ideologically monolithic
and morally abhorrent.
Civil Rights in the Bay Area
In 1964, the Bay Area’s civil rights demonstrators engaged in direct action
protests. Rena was present to record the events. Starting in February, the AfricanErich Fromm, “Let Man Prevail – A Socialist Manifesto and Program,” Let Man Prevail: A
Socialist Manifesto Program (New York, 1960) http://www.erich-fromm.de/data/pdf/1960b-e.pdf
(accessed November 15, 2009).
306
112
American Civil Rights Movement entered a new phase of confronting local businesses
accused of discriminatory practices. Groups such as the Congress of Racial Equality
(CORE), W.E.B. DuBois Clubs, Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the
National Committee to Abolish House Committee on Un-American Activities
coordinated several demonstrations throughout the Bay Area.
Historian Daniel Crowe in Profits of Rage: The Black Freedom Struggle in San
Francisco, 1956-1969 examined the transformation of the Civil Rights Movement in San
Francisco and how it transitioned into the Black Power Movement. If Rena observed the
new radical trajectory with shock and indignation and blamed it on Communist
subversion, Crowe found another reason for the increased militancy in black struggles
throughout the 1960s. He wrote, “Faced with the great social turmoil created by the
Second World War and the obstacles to equality erected by white residents, African
Americans struggled . . . to improve their station and solidify their communities.”307
Nevertheless, the moderate, Southern-oriented reform effort gave way to increasing
radicalism as “Race relations worsened and black frustrations grew during the Ike Age.”
According to Crowe, in this atmosphere of minimal progress, “a new social movement
was [soon] afoot that would challenge the basic tenets of what it meant to be an
307
Daniel Crowe, Profits of Rage: The Black Freedom Struggle in San Francisco, 1956-1969
(New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 2000), 9.
113
‘American.’ ”308 Rena’s trepidation and, ultimately, her distrust towards the more radical
movement appeared in the index cards she created.
Anticommunists particularly identified the Ad Hoc Committee to End
Discrimination as the group that represented the most extreme communist danger within
the Civil Rights Movement in Northern California. Inspired by CORE’s increasing
militancy, the Ad Hoc Committee functioned as an umbrella organization, coordinating
the efforts of various civil rights groups against local businesses.309 Rena’s summary and
analysis of the group and its activities highlighted her general feelings about civil rights
activism. She recapped her take of the organization in twenty-seven index cards that
included detailed commentary. Her chronicle began by noting that the Committee had
“burst into the public eye immediately following the controversial ‘shop-in’ staged… in
the Bay Area by the Congress for Racial Equality (CORE) and led by the increasingly
militant William Bradley” in early March 1964.310 She then described the anarchistic
nature of the “shop-in,” when “Merchandise was wantonly destroyed, business disrupted,
and general havoc wrought.” She noted as well that the “demonstration created
dissension in the ‘civil rights’ colony, with a number of otherwise sympathetic students
turning to the aid for the embattled Lucky Stores to put merchandise back on the
308
Crowe, 9.
309
Ibid., 125.
“Ad Hoc Committee to End Racial Discrimination- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66,
Records of CUAC. Hereafter cited as “AHCERD- Summery.”
310
114
shelf.”311 Despite the efforts of the demonstrators to draw attention to Lucky’s
discriminating labor practices, Vale concluded that their heavy-handed tactics had
backfired and were as damaging to any legitimate goals as the protestors might have held.
Rena focused on the activists’ divergent views. “However,” she explained with a
pastoral saying, “sheep were not quite split off from the goats in this drive.”312 Resorting
to a barrage of colloquialisms, clichés, and metaphors, she complained about the various
participants in the demonstration. At least one person, for instance, engaged in
“mumbling and much sweeping of dirt under the rug, much forcing of the lid to get it
back on despite steam generated.”313 Notwithstanding Vale’s negative view, the
shopping center event did not mark the end of such activities. In fact, in the waning
winter months of early 1964, young activists suddenly reinvigorated San Francisco’s
Civil Rights Movement. As Rena explained, “The lid blew off with loud repercussion
with the appearance of [the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination] led by an
eighteen-year-old Negro student, Tracy Simms with all the lungpower and brass of a
[young] Dorothy Healey.”314
On February 29, groups contributing to a protest demonstration against the
Sheraton-Palace Hotel formally created the umbrella organization named the Ad Hoc
Committee to End Discrimination. “[P]redominately white,” and “tossed together into a
311
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
312
Ibid.
313
Ibid.
314
Ibid.
115
salad” of DuBois Clubs, SLATE, Youth for Jobs, students from various local universities
and colleges—including UC Berkeley and San Francisco State College—with a
“sprinkling of CORE, NAACP (one faction)” as well as contributions from James
Forman (the SNCC national executive secretary), the entire Hallinen family (including
the “father Vincent correctly attired with placards),” and Beverley Axelrod of CORE.315
The Committee’s leadership included the aforementioned Tracy Simms, Mathew
“Dynamite” Hallinan, Mike Myerson (the project director), and Mike Miller, recently
returned from Mississippi.316 The Committee consisted of exactly the kind of individuals
who frustrated and angered Rena—individuals whose disorderly conduct clearly
breached the public’s good will.
Rena chronicled the events of the Sheraton-Palace Hotel demonstration with
dismay. Her sympathies lay clearly with the hotel owners. Although unstated, she
evidently favored the idea that employers had the absolute right to decide whom to hire
regardless of how this affected local communities. She noted that “arrests, releases,
restraining orders, and even a lawsuit against Tracey Simms by the Sheraton-Palace
management” created a spectacle that overshadowed the courage shown by the hotel’s
managers.317 Alas, she wrote, even though hotel officials “started off bravely by breaking
off negotiations with the committee and denouncing the Communist taint” of the protest,
315
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
316
Ibid.
317
Ibid.
116
they failed to hold off the demonstrators.318 As the picket line “swelled from 500 to an
estimated 2000, as legal restraints went pfutt [emphasis original], despite mass arrests,
and demonstrators poured into the hotel lobby to wreak havoc and bring chaos,” the
managers eventually felt “their knees began to weaken.”319 Rena viewed the pickets as a
Communist-controlled mob intent on destroying the Sheraton-Palace hotel. She feared
that their success in forcing labor concessions from the hotel management would create a
ripple effect that would resonate throughout San Francisco and open up areas for the
Party to exploit.
The committee was indeed emboldened by its initial triumph. Rena recorded that
“threats were made against 33 San Francisco hotels; overworked police were held in
leash by Major Shelley [sic: Mayor John Shelley], despite a few muttered protests from
Chief of Police [Thomas J.] Cahill.”320 It seemed to Vale that more than the Democratic
mayor worked to inhibit the only force capable of holding the anarchy at bay. “Municipal
judges,” she complained, “made themselves available to release arrestees on low ($56 to
$67) bail.”321 Rena predicted Mayor Shelley’s reaction but the justices seemed to be
prostituting themselves to Communists and fellow travelers. For Vale, this injustice from
the bench marked a low point in American history.
318
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
319
Ibid.
320
Ibid.
321
Ibid.
117
Despite the initial ray of hope that low bail represented for the protesters , Rena
reported that for them, “It was ‘darkest before the dawn,’ ” as the city arrested 165
“caterwauling, leg-shoving, and cheering” activists on Saturday night, March 7.322 Yet, in
the end, the demonstrators were in luck because “Mayor Shelley’s team capitulated” and
agreed to refrain from prosecuting misdemeanors “(for wrecking and befouling the
Sheraton-Palace),” and the hotels consented to dismiss all civil suits.323 Rena cited the
Chronicle columnist Herb Caen who charged the mayor with capitulating because 850
International Longshoremen and Warehouse Union (ILWU) members marched “en
masse on the Sheraton-Palace to ‘beef up the protest.’ ”324 This led to a twenty-point
plan—initiated by the hotel managers, the mayor, and the Committee—that would be in
force until March 7, 1966. Rena complained that while the agreement 325 ostensibly
supported equal opportunity, it actually ensured “ ‘unequal opportunity’ ” by mandating
quotas of fifteen to twenty percent for “ ‘minority groups.’ ” This mandate, she added,
was issued despite the claim “(With tongue in cheek)” that “‘Nothing in this agreement
establishes any hiring quotas.’ ”326 Vale felt the outcome was both predictable and
despicable.
322
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
323
Ibid.
324
Ibid.
325
Ibid.
326
Ibid.
118
On March 14, the Chronicle reported a meeting that took place between Governor
Edmund “Pat” Brown—“with Mayor Shelley trailing along”—and the leadership of
various civil rights groups.327 Brown condemned “unruly demonstrations” while
promising to try to increase funds for the Fair Employment Practices Commission that
would empower the commission in “mediating civil rights disputes.”328 Activists Tracy
Simms and William Bradley attended the meeting, as did San Francisco NAACP
president Dr. Thomas Burbridge, and the attorney Cecil Poole.329 Basing her comments
on accounts from the Chronicle, Rena Vale described the also-present Mike Myerson—
one of the founders of the W.E.B. Du Bois Clubs (the youth wing of the CPUSA), as
“flushed with victory” and “crowing loudly . . . ‘to a cheering throng…’ that, ‘We’re
going to do our damnedest to cause the whole white power structure to have a nervous
breakdown.’ ”330 Greatly alarmed by Myerson’s arrogant rhetoric, Vale warned that “The
new line of the Communist Party directed toward ‘youth’ has been strengthened
immeasurably.”331 But Myerson’s militancy was not alone. Both CORE and the NAACP,
in response to increased pressure from their members, seemingly sanctioned violence as a
last resort to redress racial and ethnic injustice. Rena, for example, pointed to William
Bradley, of the increasingly militant and aggressive CORE, who “defended the use of
327
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 1-14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
328
Ibid.
329
Ibid.
330
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
331
Ibid.
119
violence in defending Negro rights.”332 On the other hand, the NAACP was “huddling in
secret,” infighting having erupted over violence versus non-violence.333 She predicted
that the issue of violence and non-violence would be “debated for months, perhaps years,
to come.”334 Her words would prove prophetic.
On March 15, the Chronicle covered with “full headline force” the violent
demonstrations at the Cadillac Agency on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco, instigated
to protest against the Agency’s discriminatory hiring practices.335 The headline probably
confirmed Rena’s natural suspicions that the Communist element could resist its desire to
protest during the “two weeks’ [sic] moratorium” agreed to by Mayor Shelley and the
Committee. 336 The newspaper reported that William Bradley had given “directions to
pickets” to sit down inside the dealership and “get arrested.”337 Because “the percentage
of Negro arrestees was somewhat higher,” according to the Chronicle, than at the PalaceSheraton Hotel, the incident 338 reinforced Vale’s view that white, professional
Communists controlled the demonstrations and merely offered African Americans up as a
332
“AHCERD- Summery,” March 14, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
333
Ibid.
334
Ibid.
335
“AHCERD- Add,” March 15, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
336
Ibid.
337
Ibid.
338
Ibid.
120
token group that camouflaged the Party’s role in the protest movement.339 Indeed, she
detected “an even stronger Marxist ‘taint’ among demonstrators,” than at the previous
civil rights event.340 In fact, several demonstrators had been arrested at both events,
including Tracy Sims, Mike Myerson, Thomas Burbridge, and William Bradley—all of
whom now defied the efforts by Governor Brown, Mayor Shelley, and the “leaders of the
Negro Community” to prevent violent demonstrations.341 Radical Attorney Vincent
Hallinan promised on March 16 in the Chronicle that he would represent anyone arrested
in the demonstrations “without fee,” as his contribution to the Civil Rights Movement.
He advised his clients to “clog up the city’s legal machinery” by demanding a jury
trial.342
For Rena Vale, the various demonstrations in the Bay Area pointed to “the new,
more militant Communist Party as laid down in December, 1963 by Gus Hall.” After all,
he now promised “that ‘youth’ would be given more attention,” and asked Vale, “How
better to kill two birds with one stone? Or, more precisely, to kill that tottering old ogre,
Capitalism.”350 Vale never doubted that the Communist Party was orchestrating the
events unfolding around the Bay Area. On March 18, she reported that the anticommunist newspaper Tocsin had attached other names to the list of those arrested who
339
“AHCERD- Add,” March 15, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
340
Ibid.
341
Ibid.
342
Ibid.
121
had “Marxist and/or Communist records or affidavits.”343 These individuals included
Bettina Aptheker, David L. Jenkins, and Paul D. Richards, all of whom were the children
of notable subversives.344 Adding “the right ‘flavor’ to the demonstration,” according to
Vale, was folksinger Malvina Reynolds, who “was on hand to render her current hit
[song], ‘Little Boxes.’ ”345 In any case, by offering up a litany of names, Rena hoped to
demonstrate the pervasive presence of the Party in the Bay Area to her colleagues on the
CUAC.
On April 12, the Chronicle reported that the Ad Hoc Committee “was dusted off
again for [an] assault on S.F. auto row.”346 Vale reported that “obviously a bitter power
struggle” had erupted between the “Marxist and/or Communist” Committee and the
“‘regular’ civil rights groups of CORE and NAACP.”347 Nonetheless, she accused the
militants of CORE and NAACP of “trying hard, but hardly keeping up with the brassy
defiance and utter disrespect for law or decency exhibited” by the Committee.348 Vale
particularly blamed the fracturing of the Civil Rights Movement on the division between
advocates of violence and the adherents of non-violence. The former group seemed to
her to have a robust following, especially among students and other young activists. Even
343
“AHCERD- Note,” March 18, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
344
Ibid.
345
Ibid.
346
“AHCERD- Add,” April 12, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
347
Ibid.
348
Ibid.
122
though the police made 226 arrests, the protests, which Rena viewed as violence and
disruptive, continued. On April 18, the Chronicle reported that “(independent) LincolnMercury dealer” Jim Wessman had “capitulate[d]” and announced on-the-job training for
blacks for mechanic and sales jobs “(to comply with hiring quotas).”349 The Committee,
editorialized Vale “chalked up an unsung victory” that day.350
The Ad Hoc Committee, which extended its campaign to foster the civil rights of
minorities in the Bay Area in May, continued to captivate Rena. A May 19 Examiner
article highlighted the work of Mike Myerson, Paul Richards, and Leonard Glaser as
representatives of the W. E. B. Du Bois Club on the Committee, prompting Vale to
assert, “There is little room for doubt over the fact that this organization [the Ad Hoc
Committee to End Discrimination] is the spawn of the Marxist W.E.B. Du Bois Club.”351
Another index card described a Chronicle report from May 21 on a riot at San Francisco
City Hall. Among the 200 people involved, Rena pointed out, “many were” from the
Committee.352 The chaos associated with their demonstrations offered further proof to her
that the undisciplined radicals lacked control and intended simply to upend the American
justice system. The last public protest occurred on May 23 against the Bank of America
in downtown San Francisco. Vale noted that CORE “didn’t repudiate” Mike Myerson
and Tracy Simms for their Communist Party associations, further suggesting that the civil
349
“AHCERD- Add,” April 12, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
350
Ibid.
351
Ibid., May 18, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
352
Ibid., May 21, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
123
rights group had fallen further into the thrall of the Communists.353 In the final three
index cards, from May 25 to 27, Rena continued recording the arrested demonstrators’
names as they appeared in the Chronicle.
For Rena Vale, most civil rights demonstrations represented a disruption of law
and order that invited Communist Party manipulation and ultimate capture of the reform
movement for its own purposes. Her index obviously provided a tendentious analysis of
political developments in California that revealed her own deep fears of the social
upheaval of the 1960s. Her contention appeared to be that civil rights protests marked an
overreaction to perceived racial and ethnic injustice and were incited and manipulated by
communists and other radicals to further disrupt the United States and prepare it for a
final cataclysmic revolution. Race was critical to Rena’s view. She believed, for
example, that the white, professional radicals who spearheaded the protest movements
were guiding otherwise contented and naive African Americans into acts of seditious
behavior.
Vale heartily disapproved of Tracy Simms and filled up fifteen index cards on
her, dating from March to August 1964. Rena described her as a “Negro, former student,
professional civil rights worker,” who organized “militants” into the Ad Hoc Committee
to End Racial Discrimination, “which demonstrated with violence and insolence at the
Sheraton-Palace Hotel.”354 Rena felt Simms “performed as the true ‘militant,’ reminiscent
of Dorothy Healey in the agricultural workers strikes in the 1930s—shouted
353
“AHCERD- Add,” May 23, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
354
“Simms, Tracy,” March 1- 14, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
124
encouragement to her followers; defiance at the police, hotel management, and the lawabiding community.”355 Rena’s index cards made Simms seem as if she was pretending to
be an activist, as if Simms had found some playbook to follow. Rena clarified Simms’
communist link by writing that Simms “drew in the W.E.B. Du Bois clubs (admitted
Marxist) as well as SLATE, Youth for Jobs, some of CORE,” and various student groups
to form the Ad Hoc Committee in February 1964.356 Simms demonstrated to Rena an
easy willingness to embrace communist groups. The index from March 1 through March
14 focused on Simms’ legal problems following her multiple arrests in early 1964. An
anticommunist like Rena could see no other explanation for Tracy Simms’ actions,
except that she was falling deeper into the Communist circle.
Rena predicted, “We have not heard the last of Tracy Simms.”357 And though the
Chronicle reported that the civil rights firebrand was “sobbing with weariness,” Rena
soon reported that Simms “was back in good form and voice to take part in
demonstrations at the Cadillac Agency.”358 Once again, however, Mayor Shelley and
Simms, among others, convened a conference “to work out” what Vale called “another,
and probably meaningless, truce.”359 After spending the next month working out her legal
troubles, on April 11, Simms “barged in with a song and a sneer” at a NAACP and
355
“Simms, Tracy,” March 1- 14, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
356
Ibid.
357
Ibid.
358
Ibid., March 15, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
359
Ibid.
125
CORE demonstration at the Cadillac and Chrysler agencies and was arrested along side
225 other protestors.360 The United Freedom Fund of the NAACP supplied the 78-dollor
bail. The court found Tracy Simms found guilty on May 9 and sentenced her to “90 days
in county jail, 45 suspended, and $200 fine.”361
The San Francisco police arrested Simms again on April 15 at 2 A.M. “in a
parked car” in downtown San Francisco with “Lowell Young (another ‘veteran’ of civil
rights demonstrations- white, she colored)” and two others, this time on a curfew
check.362 Rena noted that the police accused Simms “of using obscene language” and
advising the others to remain silent.363 In short, she “resisted arrest.”364 The “car had a
loudspeaker,” according to Rena and “bare [sic] signs attacking the Redevelopment
Agency.”365 The judge released her on a $262 bail. Rena commented perhaps gratuitously
that Young and Simms had different skin tones and thus seemed out of place.
Simms appeared in newspapers in another matter unrelated to civil rights
activism. On April 29, “she and her roommates ‘routed a prowler’ who entered their
apartment at 3 A.M.”366 Rena routinely entered Simms’ roommates and their ages into
360
“Simms, Tracy,” April 12, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
361
Ibid., May 9, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
362
Ibid., April 16, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
363
Ibid.
364
Ibid.
365
Ibid.
366
Ibid., April 29, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
126
her un-American card file simply because they lived with a well-known activist accused
of Communist sympathies.
Vexed that Mayor Shelley and other San Francisco public officials continued to
vest Simms “with status” by meeting with her, Dr. Thomas Burbridge of the NAACP,
and William Bradley and Bennie Holmes of CORE, Vale complained that Simms even
had the effrontery to demonstrate with 200 others against city hall shortly before
conferring with the civil leaders.367 Subsequently, Simms castigated judges as “biased,”
juries as “trying to destroy the civil rights movement,” and, following that, called for a
sit-in at the courthouses.368 Simms warned, “The days are coming when the Bank of
America, the Sheraton-Palace, and Cadillac will be on trial, not us.”369 Rena interjected
that Simms phrased the warning in a manner that “predicted THE REVOLUTION
[emphasis original].”370
For the remainder of the summer, Simms traveled to Waco, Texas and missed her
sentencing under Judge Elton Lawless, who ordered her to spend three days in jail
starting on August 23 for contempt of court charges.371 Rena’s final index card on Simms
reprinted a story from the Oakland Tribune that the black revolutionary leader and her
fellow Committee members were “accusing reporters of harass[ment]” during their
367
“Simms, Tracy,” May 15, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
368
Ibid., May 24, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
369
Ibid.
370
Ibid.
371
Ibid., August 20-22, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
127
picketing of the Tribune building. 372 After the Tribune also reported Simms as
unemployed, Rena perhaps repeated the newspaper’s remark to suggest that the woman’s
work status may have contributed to Simms’ radicalism.
Rena watched as Tracy Simms spent nine months agitating against discrimination
across the Bay Area. Not surprisingly, the index cards revealed that Rena rejected
Simms’ charges of widespread intolerance and bigotry in the area and discounted her
commitment to civil rights. Simms’ tactics added to Rena’s distrust. Simms was an
outspoken and aggressive protestor and captured the public’s attention. Her
confrontational style harkened back to the Popular Front politics of the 1930s. This
stylistic link to her own youth seemed to ensure that Rena would see Simms as a Red or,
at least, a fellow traveler and a catalyst for further Communist Party infiltration of the
Civil Rights Movement.
The Free Speech Movement
The Free Speech Movement (FSM) exploded into existence in the fall semester of
1964 by “alienated” students “ripe for revolt” at the University of California at
Berkeley.373 The FSM protested against restrictions against political activities while on
campus—the silencing of free speech. Long-time observers of subversive activities
predicted this outburst. Responding to the 1960 anti-HUAC protests, CUAC “predict[ed]
372
“Simms, Tracy,” September 12, 1964, Box 62, Records of CUAC.
Rorabaugh, 10. The Bancroft Library runs an on-line FMS archive. “Free Speech Movement
Digital Archive,” http://bancroft.berkeley.edu/FSM/ (accessed January 20, 2010).
373
128
that the campus of every major university in the State will be plagued with a revival of
Communist activities, both overt and covert, in the immediate future.”374 The blossoming
of the FSM seemed to confirm the committee’s forecast of a Moscow-driven plot to
foment a revolution; not surprisingly, the legislative inquisitors saw a direct connection in
the increasing tempo of student activism to the Soviets. Anticommunists understood that
the student body at the UC contained pent-up rage that was about to explode. Yet, they
viewed communist mechanizations as the ignition device, dismissing the revolt as organic
to the student body. For Rena and her colleagues on the CUAC, the FSM’s goals
appeared compatible with Marxist doctrine. She watched events transpire at Berkeley
and assiduously recorded the revolution on her 3x5 cards.
The student movement began as a massive sit-in after the arrest of Jack Weinberg.
Relying on local newspapers, Vale recorded the events but vouchsafed little commentary.
She updated the index for the first time on October 8, reporting that Goldberg (the only
FSM member whose name she knew) had refuted University President Clark Kerr’s
claim that “there were Communist sympathizers [among] the hard core
demonstrators.”375 Afterwards, Rena focused on the fight between the Kerr
Administration and the evolving FSM. She recorded that Kerr had “capitulated” to the
FSM demands for student representation on discipline boards, opining that the president
374
California, Legislature, Senate, Eleventh Report of the Joint Fact-Finding Subcommittee on
Un-American Activities in California, 1961, 39.
375
“Free Speech Movement,” October 8, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
129
had blundered by allowing the student group to dominate the negotiations. 376 Her disdain
for him grew after she assumed his new committee to rehear student discipline cases
stemming from the initial demonstration would side with the students.377 The following
month, Rena found that “no dean showed up” to stop a “bearded, defiant” Steve
Weissman and twenty teacher’s assistants (TA’s) from violating political speech rules.378
The FSM and the administration continued to square off. Vale’s index on the movement
ended the day before the December sit-in with the notation that Chancellor John Strong
had wanted four FSM leaders to face the Faculty Committee on Student Conduct and that
the FSM had responded with threats of massive resistance.379
The FSM leadership interested Rena more than the plight of the organization. She
initially focused on Arthur Goldberg, painting him as the chief Communist organizer. A
former leader of the student group SLATE, a group that had a central role in previous
campus disruptions at Berkeley, he assumed major importance in the Free Speech fight.
In fact, Vale early on suggested that the FSM was “probably under his leadership.”380
Later, he threatened the administration with further student “demonstrations unless his
group got it way.”381 In November, she observed—but without supplying any evidence—
376
“Free Speech Movement,” October 16, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
377
Ibid.
378
Ibid., November 11, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
379
Ibid., December 1, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
380
Ibid., October 16, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
381
Ibid., October 29, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
130
that he “obviously” connected the Ad Hoc Committee to End Discrimination to the FSM
after the police arrested him during the November protest at the Oakland Tribune
building, further proof for her of the widespread, inter-woven communist network
operating in the Bay Area.382 Later in the semester Goldberg issued what she termed the
“ultimate insult” when he proposed using the wall of Sproul Hall to show a “French
homosexual picture.” By doing so, students on campus would be afforded an opportunity
to learn about “the love-making process in homosexuality” and thereby experience the
benefits of true free speech, even if the guardians of traditional morality found this kind
of expression repugnant.383 To be sure, Vale never expressed her views on
homosexuality, but one can safely assume that her outrage had more to do with Goldberg
and the FSM defying the traditional strictures of society than with the issue of morality
per se. Indeed, Goldberg’s bold challenge to the Christian standards of conduct
contributed to the subversion of American spiritual values, the concomitant apotheosis of
secular materialism, and the certain Soviet takeover of the United States in the near
future. Whether Vale was personally religious is unclear, but she surely considered
Christianity a unifying force in American society that fortified and invigorated its people.
Beginning in early 1964, following her activity with Women for Peace and the
Palace-Sheraton Hotel demonstration, Jacqueline (Jackie) Goldberg, Arthur’s sister and
fellow leader of the FSM, also appeared in Rena’s index.384 After Weinberg’s arrest,
382
“Free Speech Movement,” November 21, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
383
Ibid.,” November 29, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
384
“Goldberg, Jacqueline,” February 27, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
131
Rena wrote that Jackie Goldberg had surrendered the leadership of the movement to
Mario Savio, “because he has a stronger voice.”385 Goldberg then faded to the
background in the index, and Rena never had the opportunity to employ the scintillating
prose on her that she typically saved for writing about other women.
Mario Savio drew Rena’s rapt attention with his “silver tongued” orations.386
Rena started her index entries on Savio following his arrest at the Palace-Sheraton Hotel
in February 1964, being among the many future FSM leaders who would be active in
civil rights before turning to the student rebellion. At the outset of the campus uprising,
he spoke to a throng of fellow students while standing on the roof of the police car
containing Weinberg. According to Vale, he “took the lead…and destroyed” the roof.387
She credited him as well with dispersing the students out of harm’s way as “500 Berkeley
police” converged on the mob of demonstrators after he had negotiated with the
administration.388 Rena claimed also that Savio “attacked Policeman Phil Mower— [and]
385
“Goldberg, Jacqueline,” September 22- October 2, 1964, Box 60, Records of CUAC.
“Savio, Mario,” February 27, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC. The historian Robert Cohen
authored the only biography of Mario Savio, exposing the man who served as the public face of the FSM to
the light of historical inquiry. Focusing a lens on Savio as the leading student activist, according to Cohen,
demands looking beyond debates whether to “valorize or demonize” the rebellious students through
examining the “outpouring of ideas…about reforming and revolutionizing society” that the students
espoused during this unprecedented turbulence that remains unique in recent history. Robert Cohen,
Freedom’s Orator: Mario Savio and the Radical Legacy of the 1960s (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2009), 9.
386
“Savio, Mario,” October 1-3, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC. Rorabaugh claimed that the
students spoke shoeless and therefore could not have done much damage to the patrol car. Nevertheless,
they donated money to repair the damaged roof. Rorabaugh, 21. Cohen offers a detailed description of that
fateful event, focusing on the complexities of Savio’s role. See Cohen, Freedom’s Orator, chapter 5.
387
388
“Savio, Mario,” October 1-3, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
132
bit his leg.”389 The FSM grew in power in the aftermath of these incidents, and Rena
surmised that Savio and Arthur Goldberg might have been engaged in a “tiger-tussle”
“for top spot” in the FSM.390 But after devoting a month to the recruitment of graduate
students “into his orbit,” Savio left the campus to take the “gospel” of the FSM to
students elsewhere.391 Savio’s departure served as the basis for Vale’s last entry on the
student leader, whose ideological militancy and scathing oratory made him a natural
press target. In fact, Rena adopted this same focus and viewed him as the primary voice
in the FSM.
Bettina Aptheker stood out as the single most obvious Communist Party member
associated with the student activists on the Berkeley campus. Relying on the
anticommunist newspaper Tocsin for her information, Vale attributed Bettina’s
communist beliefs and affiliation to her notoriously radical father. 392 In turn, Rena
implied that the FSM’s communist taint derived from Bettina Aptheker’s prominent role
in the campus organization. Immediately following the birth of the student movement, the
fiery radical had spoken at San Francisco State College and, said Vale, in “support . . .
[of] the riot” that subsequently occurred.393 Rena followed up on Aptheker after the
semester ended.
389
“Savio, Mario,” October 1-3, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
390
Ibid., October 17, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
391
Ibid., Novemeber 12-17, 1964, Box 61, Records of CUAC.
392
“Aptheker, Bettina,” October 3, 1964, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
393
Ibid.
133
Writing about Aptheker’s continued agitation against the administration’s rules at
the University of California, Vale translated the young radical’s actions and those of the
student rebels into the language of the Popular Front. For instance, she dismissed as a
“typical Communist maneuver to duck the issue . . . the FSM ultimatum to reinstate” the
four students dismissed from the university for “ ‘Filthy Speech’. . . by 4/28 ‘or else.’ ”
Harkening back to the 1930s, the communists pursued the policy of “Kill the old
organization, ditch the leader, start a brand new organization.”394 In November, Aptheker
admitted what Rena already knew—that all along she had been (and remained) a member
of the CPUSA.395 For Vale and the CUAC, was there no clearer connection between the
Berkeley rebellion and America’s enemies than this?
The Free Speech Movement may have been the most dramatic upheaval of the
decade, sparking further rebellion and disorder throughout California. For
anticommunists like Rena, the FSM’s success in enticing college students represented a
major victory after many years of trying to organize campuses, but it also augured even
greater triumphs in the future, as the Party line proffered young persons seemed to
resonate as never before.
President Clark Kerr presided over the entire University of California during this
period, but Chancellor Edward W. Strong governed the UC Berkeley campus during that
fateful fall semester. He suspended eight students following the initial sit-in, setting
himself up as the number one enemy of the FSM. Rena responded to his role by
394
“Aptheker, Bettina,” April 29, 1965, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
395
Ibid., November 9, 1965, Box 59, Records of CUAC.
134
generating fifty-three cards on Chancellor Strong from a March 12, 1965 interview he
gave to the Tribune, from various reports in the Examiner and the Chronicle, and finally
from the February 1965 issue of California Monthly. The index recorded the interviews
in 1965 before explaining Strong’s crucial role during the fall semester upheaval.
Throughout the index, Vale expressed deep sympathy for Strong and fierce disdain for
Kerr, whose bumbling leadership—she believed—had caused the rise of FSM and the
eventual fall of Strong. 396
She described Strong with lurid prose, as if he were a protagonist in one of her
science fiction stories. Indeed, he was “the voice that lost—the man who got crushed in
the treacherous gears of the Kerr machine.”397 From the two erstwhile allies, Vale could
construct a Manichean narrative—Kerr as the feckless liberal and Strong as the tough
hardliner. While the champions of appeasement, Kerr and the new chancellor, Martin
Meyerson, kept their jobs, the vigorously anti-communist Strong lost his when Kerr
forced him to resign. Rena reacted predictably: “battle over; defeat.”398 Her sympathetic
feelings also surfaced when she described Strong, “at 63 a bent, crushed, and broken
man,” having to appear in April before a municipal court to testify “ ‘hesitantly’ to the
396
Clark Kerr disagreed with Vale, CUAC, and others who complained his weak leadership
exacerbated the rebellion, offering a thorough rebuttal in his memoirs. See Clark Kerr, The Gold and the
Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967: Volume Two: Political Turmoil
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
397
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” March 12, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
398
Ibid.
135
events which broke him.”399 Vale certainly accepted Strong’s claim that his tenure as
chancellor had ended when he protested Kerr acquiescing to the Savio and Suzanne
Goldberg duo.400 She also accepted Strong’s rendition of the events on the Berkeley
campus between during the 1964-1965 academic year.
According to Vale, on September 28, 1964, Strong had “announced a substantial
concession” to students, as the “pickets” formed to march against even this
capitulation.401 However, by October 6, “Kerr began undercutting” Strong by overriding
his decisions.402 Refusing to “smear all the other good kids by calling (the demonstrators)
Communist-led,” Chancellor Strong cautioned that the university should not confuse
politics and free speech.403 The campus battle continued into October and November.
Vale warned that the committee Kerr set-up to consider student grievances had
announced policies “usurping the power of the admin.” and then, shortly after, that it was
“apparent that [Strong was] getting pretty well beat down.”404 Kerr and Strong next
issued a joint “appeal to reason,” expecting that “reasonableness will prevail” at the
demonstrations on December 3. However, as Rena reported caustically, “P.S. It
399
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” April 3, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
400
Ibid.
401
Ibid., September, 9, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
402
Ibid., October 6, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
403
Ibid., October 20, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” November 17, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC; “Strong, Dr. Edward,”
November 23, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
404
136
didn’t.”405 On the evening of the sit-in and mass arrests, Strong entered the hospital
following the turmoil he could not prevent. The Executive Committee of the Berkeley
Chapter of the American Association of University Professors was “hypocritical
enough,” according to Rena, to wish Strong well “after demanding his head on a
platter.”406
After a short hospital stay, Strong faced the aftermath of the campus maelstrom.
He attempted to hold a meeting in Wheeler Hall, but when he canceled it after an unruly
sit-in disrupted the meeting, he was forced to endure shrill “criticism for this action . . .
facts were distorted . . . [and he became the] object of covert and open attack.”407 Five
days later, Rena reported that the Regents had responded to the campus Academic Senate
Committee on Academic Freedom’s vote in the students’ favor by reconfirming that the
president’s and chancellor’s power to discipline students resided in the State Constitution
and was non-negotiable.408 Vale felt the Regents had put Berkeley’s “arrogant Academic
Senate group. . . in its place”—and by extension the Kerr Administration.409
Nevertheless, Rena noted, the faculty senate “continued sniping in its ‘nice’ way” in
support of the arrested students.410 After recording the event, she revealed that CUAC
405
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” December 3, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
406
Ibid., December 9, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
407
Ibid., December 13, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
408
Ibid., December 18, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
409
Ibid.
410
Ibid.
137
had at least some informants reporting to it. She wrote, “From [a] private source close to
the Prof. Arthur Ross…, [the] writer learned that Ross had made clear he wanted the
position of Chancellor replacing Strong.”411 Slicing through the lofty rhetoric of students’
rights, Vale found Ross engaged in a clear power grab against the one person who fought
valiantly against the leftist threat, Dr. Edward Strong.
Rena summarized Strong’s fate. By December, she wrote, “everyone on campus
was unhappy and the business of ‘teaching and learning’ was in shambles. Kerr was
saying little, if anything, publically, [Strong] was under attack from all sides, drooling
wolves closing in for the kill, as it were.”412 Near the end of the month, a confidential
source Rena called “B-35” handed her a report from the Academic Senate Committee on
Academic Freedom to be given over to the Faculty Senate in early January.413 She
recognized that “pressures were obviously building up behind the scenes” after Strong
agreed to the committee’s pro-student report and then suddenly reversed himself the next
day.414 On January 3, Strong stepped down and Martin Meyerson, not the “eager Ross,”
became acting Chancellor.415
Strong gave an interview to the Tribune on March 12 and defended his record as
chancellor. Emphatically maintaining that Strong “was forced from office over his
411
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” December 18, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
412
Ibid.
413
Ibid.
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” December 31, 1964, Box 66, Records of CUAC; “Strong, Dr. Edward,”
January 1, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
414
415
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” January 1, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
138
protests [emphasis original],”416 Rena focused attention on the former Chancellor’s
highly critical comments regarding his interactions with Kerr. Strong especially noted
Kerr’s constant acquiescence to the students as a cause of the friction between them.
The card file assembled on Strong reflected Vale’s empathy with the Chancellor’s
plight, clearly favoring Strong over Kerr or the students. In supporting Strong, she
temporarily lost her anticommunist focus. Instead, she noted the nuanced politics
governing Strong’s eventual termination, for once displaying an understanding of the
more complex side of a political debate. Nowhere did she suggest that Strong embodied
the victim of communist machinations. Rena, evidently immersed so thoroughly in the
political drama, failed to use her cards to show the various circles of the Communist
Party. Truly, for once she did not see red everywhere. In the case of the Chancellor
Strong’s demise, the real villain was Clark Kerr.
Conclusion
Vale started writing the Bay Area Reports after the Free Speech Movement,
probably switching to the report format in response to the increasingly chaotic post-FSM
Bay Area. She likely hoped that she might be able to cover the turmoil with more details
in a report, than on note cards. A brief overview of the reports indicates that she believed
that—as the mayhem spread on campuses—the subversives had found an easily swayed
416
“Strong, Dr. Edward,” March 12, 1965, Box 66, Records of CUAC.
139
audience. Although using a new format, she continued tracking student and civil rights
activists and recording their un-American beliefs. Unfortunately, as with the indices, the
reports fell into poor condition, most likely because of the way the collection was
handled before arriving at the California State Archives. The first and second reports no
longer survive but each individual report’s index hints at what the reports contained. The
final two reports did not survive either. Unlike the first reports, the index card record for
these two reports fails to clarify what they contained. In any case, she continued to work
on the reports until 1969 before moving to Illinois to write three published novels.
Rena officially appeared in the fourteenth Report as a secretary in 1967,
increasing the mystery of just how much effect she had on the committee. She added that
Report to her index. Her signature style seemed to be her ability to create detailed
indices. Rena most likely wrote major sections of the Report 1967. However, her work
beyond her initial index cards are the story of another time.
140
Chapter 5
CONCLUSION
Rena Vale demanded more from life than a society expecting passivity from
women proving could provide. She found a modicum of acceptance in Los Angeles in the
twenties and the thirties—first as a secretary and assistant to male writers then as a cardcarrying Communist. The Communist Party at least nominally promoted professional
woman. But even the Party could not overcome the economic pressures created by the
Great Depression or entrenched gender lines. Its propaganda could not reverse the
common sense adage that employing a woman often meant unemployment for another
family’s male breadwinner. When she failed as a professional writer even with her Party
connections, she grew ever more weary and disgusted with the organization, leading to
her rejection of Marxism. Her volta face soon led her to not merely denounce the
doctrines of scientific materialism, but to view all Marxists as threats to America—home
of the rugged individual—and eventually to embrace an extreme anticommunist
conservative ethos capable of rallying the country against the Red menace. She
eventually found a forty-year home with CUAC. In fact, her close connections to every
leader of CUAC made her perhaps the most important anticommunist women in
California.
Although Red Scares came and went, Rena retained and then honed her intense
antipathy toward communism for the rest of her life. The values she developed during the
1939 Little Red Scare continued to color her opinions. Oddly, however, Rena remained
on the sidelines as the most famous Red Scare suddenly kicked off, reached a fevered
141
pitch, and ended as the star player imploded. Only in the sixties did Rena start working
again as a professional anticommunist. She preserved her form of anticommunism all
throughout her career with CUAC, bringing with her assumptions formed about
communism during her time in the Party. The Popular Front that originally had attracted
her to the Party in the mid thirties would later cause her outrage as she concluded that the
CPUSA had achieved success with the baby boom generation using the exact same tactic
that had ensnared her. She continually viewed the radical groups she saw spring up
around the Bay Area as evidence of a resurgent Popular Front.
She continued to view communism as one giant “-ism” that essentially remained
immutable throughout its various incarnations. She wrote that communism “is
monolithic.”417 During the time she wrote that statement, she claimed that Stalin received
the reports from each party in each country and set the Party’s worldwide agenda,
ensuring that the every Communist Party member operated in concert with each other.418
She acknowledged the Party adopted new tactics while she clung to the idea that the
Party never fundamentally changed. Vale felt the New Left either cynically or naively
channeled the previous monolithic structure in a new form, and she denied its claims of
offering a non-communist alternative to the Old Left.
Vale’s treatment of other women made her and other female anticommunists
distinctive, because their entire approach assumed that radical women had agency and
therefore deserved to be treated the same as male communists. Rena never doubted that
417
Vale, Against the Red Tide, 21.
418
Ibid.
142
both sexes voluntarily embraced the foul ideology and both equally embodied grave
national threats to the nation. In this, she and other female communist hunters eschewed
the prevailing doctrine among their male counterparts that posited that the “weakbrained” gender naturally took their political cues from men. Instead, Rena accepted
unequivocally that women were politically equal to men, and never for a moment did she
entertain the possibility that women possessed a special innate morality that inured them
against communist propaganda. Conversely, she noticed that cunning and diabolical
women could hide behind a veil of innocence while nudging unsuspecting men, such as
their boyfriends, husbands, or bosses, towards the wicked doctrine. Except for refusing to
deny women a political voice, which meant she went after radical females with the same
ardor and vigor as she did their male counterparts, her approach to the pursuit of Red
Californians did not differ from that of her male colleagues.
In conclusion, I would like to end with a note of regret that I could not find Rena
Hale’s private papers. They would certainly clear up many mysteries about this
interesting woman. The index cards, while revealing her feelings on contemporary
events, primarily served an audience of anticommunist, conservative old men. One
cannot be sure of how much she tailored her comments to suite them. At least her index
file seemingly offered up a dim hope that Americans would respond in time to fend off
either conquest by the Soviet Union or nuclear annihilation. Her fiction, on the other
hand, proposed a much more pessimistic scenario. But then her purpose was to shock her
reading audience into action against the possibility of planetary extinction. Clearly,
143
additional work is required to understand this fascinating and thoroughly twentiethcentury woman.
144
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