Reconstruction 8.1 (2008)

Return to Contents»

 

Morris Ernst's Troubled Legacy / Brett Gary

 

Abstract: Examining the contradictory life of the important legal activist Morris Ernst, this essay repositions its subject as one of the most significant public intellectuals of the 1920s and 1930s.  Yet the intellectual independence demonstrated by Ernst is shown to have been compromised through his post-war collaboration with the F.B.I.

 

Introduction

<1> Morris Leopold Ernst's name elicits little recognition today, except from those who know the histories of literary modernism and its censorship battles, the birth control movement in the Margaret Sanger era, the early decades of the ACLU and, to a lesser extent, the history of liberal anticommunism in the US. Yet a leading scholar in the field of book history declared Ernst the most important unstudied figure in 20th century American cultural history. So, who is this forgotten but vital figure? Two different glosses suggest the larger social, political, and cultural Popular Front and Cold War era tensions he illuminates: He was arguably the nation's most prominent civil liberties lawyer in the late 1920s and 30s, known especially for his anti-censorship work; by the early 1940s through the 50s he was the foremost liberal flack for J. Edgar Hoover and an ardent anti-communist. Although this is not an unfamiliar trajectory for disaffected leftists and liberals, Ernst's story is noteworthy and essentially untold, and in part it is the story of the lost legacy of a once important progressive voice, who always thought himself a progressive. [1]

<2> By the mid-1920s, Ernst (1888-1976), was closely allied with the ACLU's founder Roger Baldwin in a variety of causes, and through the ACLU and his New York City law firm he forcefully engaged in struggles against censorship, racial intolerance, media concentration, and a lack of reproductive rights for women. By the eve of WWII, no one in the US had done more to thwart censors' attacks on a variety of cultural forms, from literature to nudism, burlesque theatre, and radio - and no one had done more to rationalize birth control laws, either. He was also a prolific, self-promoting author of middlebrow works about struggles against "Comstockery" in all its forms. Ernst authored or co-authored twenty-one books, and kept the anti-censorship strain of liberalism before the public for decades. [2] He gained his greatest fame for his defense of literary modernist texts, including Radclyffe Hall's Well of Loneliness, and most famously, James Joyce's Ulysses. [3]

<3> Ernst is a towering figure in the history of American battles over obscenity law and censorship – the key figure until the 1950s - and a high profile liberal anti-communist who publicly championed and covertly abetted J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI's anti-communist tactics and goals. Ernst both believed and argued that his anticommunism was a coherent extension of his core liberal values, especially the promotion of due process and the protection of the marketplace of thought. But it was not as straightforward as he suggested, and the irony is that Ernst burnished the image of the FBI's reliability and integrity, at a considerable cost to his own. Although active in many causes until his death in 1976, he seems to have made his most significant mark in American legal history from the late 1920s through the early 1940s, while still a relatively young man, before he became an ardent anticommunist.

<4> Ernst earned his reputation as a leading civil liberties lawyer when, as a determined critic of U.S. obscenity laws, he co-authored an influential history of obscenity law titled To the Pure (1928), and shortly thereafter compiled a series of crucial legal victories in federal, state, and local courts over a variety of obscenity censorship practices. [4] Although he was not the first civil libertarian to take on local and federal obscenity laws and their agents, he was the most systematic and successful by far until a new generation of lawyers took on these issues in the late 1950s. [5] Neutralizing the legal arguments and cultural rationale behind the enforcement of Victorian-era obscenity laws, and ridiculing the symbolically potent censors who enforced cultural and legal "Comstockery," Ernst deserves recognition as the legal midwife to literary and sexual modernism in the US for his work against obscenity laws. [6]

<5> Central to his strategic assault on obscenity laws, Ernst also orchestrated important test cases to advance knowledge of human sexuality, and to give women greater control over their reproductive lives. Between 1929 and 1937, he and his associates in the New York law firm Greenbaum, Wolff, and Ernst won five federal court cases challenging Customs Bureau and Post Office censorship practices over sex hygiene and education materials and birth control information barred under the authority of the 1873 Comstock laws. Defending the importation of books authored by British birth control activist Marie Stopes in two Custom's Bureau cases, the mailing of American sexologist Mary Ware Dennett's sex hygiene pamphlet, and the receipt of birth control devices and information by the Birth Control Federation of America (BCFA) associates of Margaret Sanger, Ernst devoted his strategic vision and legal expertise to reproductive rights law. He maintained a long relationship with Sanger as her counsel and as general counsel to the BCFA, later named Planned Parenthood. [7]

<6> General counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) from 1929-1954, Ernst he aggressively pursued and publicized the anti-censorship cause, and brought attention to sexuality and obscenity matters into the ACLU's orbit. Although he was not the first civil libertarian to take on local and federal obscenity laws and their agents, he was the most systematic and successful by far until a new generation of lawyers took on these issues in the late 1950s. [8] By the eve of World War II, when his energy and political focus shifted to war related matters and the cause of anti-communism, Ernst had, for over a decade, battled the cultural practices, legal logic, and administrative apparatus of the anti-obscenity forces in New York City, New York State, and in the federal government. In the courts, and in the court of public opinion, Ernst and associates, especially Harriet Pilpel and Alexander Lindey, dismantled the assumptions under girding obscenity laws in the US as they had evolved in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, persuading the courts that the 19th century obscenity laws and standards were outdated to meet the needs of a diverse, modern public; that the burden of literary evaluation should be shifted away from judges and juries onto literary experts who could act as guides to literary modernism and other cultural fare; by challenging prosecutors' claims of audience vulnerability to harm through their encounters with sexual materials; by defending as "scientific" and necessary to a modern public the reputable sexology literature dealing with masturbation and married sexual pleasure; and by defending the right of certain classes of recipients - namely married women and their licensed physicians - to have access to birth control information and technologies. Most important, they convinced local and federal judges alike that 19th century obscenity law language was altogether too vague to meet the standards of legal precision necessary to modern jurisprudence. [9]

<7> Born in Alabama to German Jewish immigrant parents, Ernst grew up in New York City, attended Horace Mann School, received a bachelor's degree at Williams College, and worked in the shirt-making business while attending the New York School of Law at night. By the mid-1920s, through his association with Roger Baldwin, he became an executive officer of the American Fund for the Republic, known as the Garland Fund – essentially the primary source of money for left-wing causes in the 1920s. His work as Treasurer for the Garland Fund and on the Executive Board of the ACLU brought him into radical circles of all stripes. Ernst had a wide range of legal and political interests beyond the literary and the sexual, and he engaged in struggles against racial intolerance, on behalf of collective bargaining, and against democracy-constricting oligopolistic economic practices, especially when those practices inhibited the flow of information and ideas through different communications media. Through these issues he developed a consistent set of principles about the right to speak and the necessity of the public's access to a rich and diverse "marketplace of ideas." [10] A bon vivant and libertarian, but not himself a political radical, Ernst was a skilled legal thinker and strategist who developed an open marketplace agenda aimed at protecting the flow of ideas and information necessary to a healthy democracy. He was, in short, a New Deal, popular front liberal whose affiliations, ideals, and in-the-trenches political experiences led him to an aggressive anti-communism by the end of the 1930s. Along these lines he was not completely out of step with other executive level members of the ACLU or other popular front liberals in general.

<8> Ernst served on the ACLU's Executive Board from 1927 to 1954. He also became General Counsel to the Union's national office by 1929, and held that position through the tumult of the 1930s, 1940s, and early 1950s. His obvious talents made him a valuable, much utilized resource for progressive and modernist circles. His eventual ardent anti-communism also made this affiliation fraught and his legacy within the ACLU controversial. Indeed, his obsession with Communism and fealty to J. Edgar Hoover dominated Ernst's career by the early 1940s, making for tendentious executive level ACLU relations through the 1950s, and straining his relations with cultural and political progressives in general.

<9> Although friends and foes knew that Ernst was a dependable protector of Hoover and the FBI's reputation, they did not know he had become a covert informant as well. Hoover accurately assessed that he could rely on Ernst to do his bidding among the "responsible" and "serious liberal crowd," [11] and Ernst became the preeminent liberal defender of the FBI, writing glowing tributes to Hoover and "his boys" in journals such as The Nation, and also in mainstream publications such as Life, Saturday Evening Post, and Reader's Digest. [12] The result for the civil liberties community was that a talented, well-respected leader spent his time promoting Hoover rather than challenging him, parroting Hoover's statements, rather than poking holes in them, and giving Hoover advance warning of developing criticisms from progressive circles. The result for Ernst seems to have been a diminution of his prestige and reputation within the community of civil libertarians among whom he had been a leader.

 

Part I: The Libertarian Ernst: In Defense of Literary and Cultural Modernism

<10> The first federal obscenity law in the U.S., passed in 1842, authorized the Customs Service to confiscate "obscene or immoral" pictures, and by the time of the American Civil War (1861-1865), widespread obscenity statutes were on the books in the individual states. Most of these statutes shared an English Common Law language and set of assumptions, especially that common law prohibited "whatever outrages decency and is injurious to public morals." In 1868, in the British case of Regina v Hicklin, Lord Chief Justice Cockburn articulated a definition of obscenity that shaped obscenity law in American courts until the 1930s. The Hicklin standard turned on whether "the tendency of the matter charged as obscenity is to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences, and into whose hands a publication of this sort may fall." [13] This broad, conditional language was a prosecutor's dream: it required proof only that a work could be interpreted as obscene, and required neither demonstration of ill intent, nor actually harmed readers or viewers. This loose standard of causality accepted strong moralistic assertions of probable or possible effects as sufficient evidence of potentially damaging effects, especially to the young and vulnerable. [14]

<11> In the United States, the cultural and legal assault on obscene materials accelerated dramatically after 1873, when the now infamous Anthony Comstock, Secretary of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice and the leading advocate of efforts to stamp out offensive materials, persuaded Congress to expand the federal obscenity law. The 1873 federal "Comstock Law" barred sending through the mails not only "any obscene, lewd, or lascivious book, pamphlet, picture, print, or other publication of vulgar and indecent character," but "any article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion." By specifically adding birth control information and devices to the list of banned materials, the law effectively extended federal jurisdiction into all matters relating to reproduction, and put the authority of the Postal and Customs officials behind efforts to police the mails. [15] The Supreme Court upheld the constitutionality of the Comstock Act in a series of late 19th century cases, and local and federal courts routinely employed the language of the Hicklin standard of "proof." [16]

<12> In short, from the civil war era until the mid-1930s accurate scientific information about married sex, adolescent sexuality, masturbation, homosexuality, reproduction, abortion and the birth control were consistently deemed obscene and were kept out of the mails and bookstores to prevent them from falling into the hands of susceptible audiences.

<13> Against this backdrop, Ernst, Pilpel, Lindey and others in their firm undertook a decade-long assault on obscenity laws. As they learned what New York city and state judges were amenable to, their agenda became increasingly strategic and focused on orchestrating winnable test cases at the federal level. They won by convincing judges and juries that the vague, overreaching language of the obscenity laws were outmoded and anathema to modern standards of legal evidence and to the needs of a diverse, modern public. [17] Ernst's autobiographical statements indicate that his interests in obscenity matters developed in 1927, after losing a Customs Bureau obscenity case in defense of a small bookseller arrested by agents of the New York Society for the Prevention of Vice for selling an obscene book, John Hermann's What Happens. [18] Ernst subsequently became obsessed with fighting local and federal obscenity laws, and with doing battle against John M. Sumner, the New York Vice Society heir to the notorious Anthony Comstock. Sumner stood for a particularly repressive Victorianism, and his underhanded tactics against booksellers and publishing houses galled and motivated Ernst. [19] Ernst proved a quick study, co-writing an influential history of obscenity law in 1928 entitled To the Pure, a thoroughgoing attack on Comstockery as an intellectual and cultural offense, and useful as a legal primer for others interested in such battles. Through his subsequent successes defending local booksellers in the New York City Magistrate's Courts, and his strategic victories in the federal courts, he had become the most important anti-censorship strategist and trial lawyer in the United States by the early 1930s.

<14> Ernst also served as legal counsel to leading publishing houses (including Random House, and Putnam), and to more adventurous smaller firms committed to publishing provocative works (including Vanguard and Viking), and was a chief defender of the dozens of New York City booksellers routinely hassled by Sumner and his smut hounds. He gained his lasting fame for his defense of James Joyce's Ulysses, but throughout the period from 1929 to the mid-1930s, he rendered John Sumner's Vice Society essentially toothless by winning decision after decision in the local courts in defense of booksellers for selling, among other works: Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness, Arthur Schnitzler's Casanova's Homecoming and Reigen, George Moore's A Storyteller's Holiday, and Gustave Flaubert's November, to name but a few. [20] Additionally, Ernst and his allies in the growing anti-censorship movement - including the ACLU's affiliate organization, the National Coalition Against Censorship - helped shaped public opinion on censorship matters nationally and locally by publicizing Ernst's and others' censorship battles.

<15> In addition, Ernst strategically cultivated his battles with federal authorities, and his lasting claim to fame - his victory over Customs officials in the 1933 Ulysses case - was long planned and hoped-for outcome of a series of cases he set in motion with the 1929 Well of Loneliness case. His anti-censorship ally, Lewis Gannett, book critic and columnist for the New York Herald, chronicled Ernst's local and federal victories from 1927-1933, locating the Ulysses decision within Ernst's larger assault on obscenity law. While touting Ernst's body of work and celebrating the prize of the Ulysses case, Gannett also illustrates the strategic, promotional relationship Ernst developed with book critics and journalists who were lined up with him on the anti-censorship, anti-Sumner front. Celebrating the victories over Sumner, without ever mentioning Sumner directly, Gannett writes:

The tide really turned about the time that Morris Ernst, attorney, who has fought most of the historic censorship cases of the last five years … lost a censorship case the previous year (1927) … The defeat aroused a crusading zeal in Mr. Ernst. He dug into the history of censorship, published his books exposing its absurdities and contradictions, and emerged as the logical and fearless defender of frank, honest literature.

In 1929, with Mr. Ernst as defending counsel in both cases, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness was cleared of the charge of obscenity in General Sessions, and Magistrate Gottlieb gave [Schnitzler's] Casanova's Homecoming a clean-cut endorsement. In 1930 the Circuit Court of Appeals reversed an adverse verdict of a lower court on Mary Ware Dennett's The Sex Side of Life, and Judge Woolsey, in the first of three decisions which have become historic, ruled in favor of Dr. Marie Stopes's Married Love ... An amazing series of amazing victories for Morris Ernst.

The Ulysses decision is the culmination of a long struggle for sanity. Judge Woolsey's decision is not necessarily binding on the state courts of this and still less of other states, nor are the little censors of the Post Office Department officially bound by it. But the large scope, the careful wording and thinking of Judge Woolsey's previous decisions have had their effect on other courts, and the Ulysses decision is sure to prove a monument. [21]

<16> As Gannett indicated, Ernst's work on literary materials was not separable from his defense of materials about human sexuality, and his commitment to rationalizing federal law concerning both cultural expression and reproductive matters.

 

In Defense of Sexual Modernism

<17> Indeed, Ernst should be as well remembered for his defenses of sex hygiene and birth control information as for his defenses of literature. Between the Radclyffe Hall Custom's Bureau case in 1929, and the Ulysses Customs decision in 1933, Ernst won three different federal obscenity trials on publications about human sexuality and contraception. (Between 1936-37 he won two more federal cases for the birth control movement on matters dealing with birth control technologies and who could legitimately receive such materials).

<18> Beginning in 1929, in what became a highly publicized case (due in part to the ACLU's promotional work) Ernst eventually gained Mary Ware Dennett the right to use the mails to distribute her widely-used, well-respected pamphlet on human sexuality, "The Sex Side of Life." Dennett's case put modern youth and access to information about sexuality on trial, and among things, revealed divisions between Protestant modernists, on one side, and the Catholic church and Protestant evangelicals, on the other. Because she dared to write frankly about masturbation as normal, and not morally fraught, and about sex as pleasurable and sexual feelings as natural, she was accused of, and initially found guilty for trafficking in obscene materials. The core cultural anxieties about youth, masturbation, and the breakdown of self-discipline and chastity as the bulwark of moral order suffused the discussions surrounding the case, and Dennett's repudiation of the literature and folklore against masturbation (with its warnings of madness, infirmity, and licentiousness leading to self-destruction) was the central issue both for those defending and those opposing her. Ernst, the ACLU, and others actively publicized the case, and in early 1930 Ernst succeeded in overturning Dennett's lower court conviction for distributing obscene materials through the mail. [22]

<19> Fresh from this victory, he approached British birth control activist (and eugenicist) Marie Stopes challenging the Custom's Bureau ban on the importation of two of her books, her advice manual Married Love (the case was "United States v. Married Love") and her birth control book, entitled Contraception. [23] Like the Dennett case, the Stopes trials marked important legal challenges to an older moral order, and the growing legal recognition of the right of the modern adult public to have access to frank, scientific information about sexuality and its pleasures, and reproduction and its control. Ernst won both cases in 1931.

<20> Not coincidentally, at the time Ernst was defending Mary Ware Dennett, he also began working as counsel for Margaret Sanger (Dennett's rival in the inchoate, increasingly active American birth control movement), defending the 16th Street birth control clinic against a raid and seizure of all records by the New York City police. Thus began Ernst's and his law firm's long association with Sanger and the American birth control movement, including Ernst's efforts at mediating relations between Sanger and Dennett, who had very different ideas about the goals, strategies, and leadership of the birth control movement. For the progressive sexual modernists such as Dennett, Sanger, and Stopes, and for Ernst and his colleagues, mainly Harriet Pilpel - who had a long career as counsel for the birth control movement - the issues of sexual pleasure and knowledge could not be separated from the issue of the right of reproductive control. Arguably Ernst, Pilpel and Lindey's made theirs the most important law firm in the country on birth control matters in the 1930s and 40s, when the birth control movement was dramatically expanding and seeking legal rather than legislative solutions. Following their defense of Sanger's clinic against police raids in 1929, they won two mid-1930s federal birth control cases about the right of licensed physicians and scientific researchers to have access to birth control information and technology. United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, (1936) and US v Norman E. Himes (1937) [24] were, like the literature cases, orchestrated as test cases, and these decisions ensured that the federal government could not deny birth control information and devices to licensed physicians, their clinics, and druggists. In all, Ernst and his associates won five federal cases between 1931-1937, establishing that doctors could prescribe contraceptives to preserve the lives and protect the health of their married patients (unless proscribed by state laws), and that federal postal and customs officials could not interfere with distribution or dissemination of materials addressed to the "privileged class" of recipients—namely, licensed professionals. [25]

<21> By the eve of WWII, no one in the ACLU - or, indeed, in the US - had done more to expand legal protection to a variety of cultural forms, from literature and art to nudism, to burlesque theatre, and no one had done more to rationalize birth control laws, either. Ernst was the figure mainly responsible for pushing the ACLU in the direction of protecting cultural and sexual "speech" rights and was, without question, the most important figure in the ACLU's first three decades for the defense of cultural and sexual modernism, and the leading force in getting the ACLU to pay attention to these matters.

 

Part II: Anti-Communism and J. Edgar Hoover

<22> Although Ernst's concerns with American communists pre-dated the Nazi-Soviet Pact in August 1939, following the pact his worldview became increasingly Manichean, with a noticeable shift of focus, from solving the problem of obscenity law to asserting the problem of American communists. I'll suggest three overarching reasons why Ernst became ardent in his anti-communism. First, as treasurer of the Garland Fund in the 1920s and early 1930s, he knew what limited monies were available to radical organizations, and as the stock market crash depleted the balance of precious Garland Fund monies, he fumed as Communist organizations failed to repay loans to the Fund or when Communist defendants skipped bail on money lent by the Garland Fund. Second, like many other liberals and socialists who had frequent encounters with Communists in different political organizations, he regarded the Communists as intolerant, intent on taking over most Popular Front organizations and focusing them on the Communist agenda. The Communists' bullying tactics and their lack of concern for the speech and organizational rights of others irked civil libertarians, and for Ernst this came to a head when he and others perceived an attempted Communist take-over of the National Lawyers Guild, which he had helped found. And third, he found unconscionable the willingness of American communists to defend Moscow's positions on all matters: after the Nazi-Soviet Pact and the Soviet invasion of Finland in November, he could no longer abide affiliation with anyone who could continue to be a party member, and distrusted their fundamental loyalties. He saw them as intellectually dishonest - he called them "intellectual ferryboats" for their willingness to do Moscow's bidding - and he hated their tendency to create front organizations and hide under what he described as their "nightshirts."

<23> As the world political crises of the late 1930s and early 40s deepened, and the search for subversives intensified, Ernst remained steadfastly an advocate of due process, procedural fairness, and disclosure. But it is also clear that Ernst came to filter virtually everything in the realm of politics and culture through the lens of the conflict between democracy and totalitarianism. For Ernst the necessity of exposing "totalitarians" in all those institutions they were attempting to control or hide themselves in was imperative. The problem was doing so without surrendering due process and civil liberties. [26]

<24> Given its commitment to freedoms of speech, association, and due process, the relationship between the ACLU and American communists posed a peculiar kind of problem for Ernst and other executive leaders of the Union. Always regarded suspiciously by rightwing anti-Communists such as Congressman Martin Dies (of HUAC fame), the ACLU's many Popular Front alliances made it especially vulnerable to charges of being sympathetic to, or in league with, Communists. Prior to August 1939, Ernst and other executive board members were determined to protect its reputation and to stave off investigation by HUAC or others, and repeatedly rejected charges that the ACLU was a Red front organization. [27] Following the Nazi-Soviet Pact, the ACLU executives felt compelled to act, and by the end of 1939 they began batting around the idea of changing the Union's charter to prohibit members of totalitarian organizations from holding executive positions. ACLU records reveal that Ernst was an active force in this drive. [28] In a letter dated February 1, 1940 to the Union's director, Roger Baldwin, Ernst warned: "If the Board of Directors takes no action, there will be hell to pay, with the Union really in peril." [29] He drafted the resolution calling for the ban, and seems to have been the whip who counted and marshaled the votes through. On February 5, 1940, the Executive Committee adopted Ernst's resolution, with small changes. His resolution read, in part:

Consistency is inevitably compromised by persons who champion civil liberties in the United States and yet who justify or tolerate the denial of civil liberties by dictatorships abroad.

The Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union therefore hold it inappropriate for any person to serve on the governing committee of the Union or on its staff, who is a member of any political organization which supports totalitarian dictatorship in any country, or who by his public declarations indicates his support of such a principle. [30]

The resolution passed by a narrow margin within the Executive Board, and by a somewhat larger ratio by the National Committee. It produced a firestorm within the Union itself, and resulted in the immediate resignation of Executive Board Member Harry Ward and the eventual expulsion by "trial" of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, a founding member of the ACLU who had recently been reappointed to the Board for an additional three year term, despite the Board's knowledge that she was a Communist party member. [31]

<25> Clearly, the Nazi-Soviet pact forced a change in the Union's policy, and it compelled Ernst to more aggressively pursue an anti-communist agenda as an individual. Most significantly, it seems to have prompted Ernst to forge a relationship with J. Edgar Hoover. Because he thought Hoover was the most responsible of the leading anti-communists - an opinion about Hoover he would hold, and proclaim, for years - Ernst was willing to attach his anti-Communism to Hoover's organization and its methods. By the time Ernst's fervent devotion to Hoover waned in the mid-1950s, he had willingly spent much of his political capital among liberals and progressives by publicly defending Hoover from the kind of close scrutiny he should have been subjected to by such a prestigious civil libertarian, and nation's most important civil liberties organization. But Ernst did not investigate Hoover, and only rarely challenged him, and his relationship to Hoover clearly kept the ACLU at bay, as well.

<26> How to account for the Ernst-Hoover alliance, and Ernst's perception of that alliance? After all, Ernst was not prone to intellectual and political inconsistency or incoherence. Indeed, he was logical, careful, disciplined, and had a coherent argument about information flows and democracy.

<27> Throughout his career, Ernst used a set of interrelated ideas to defend his positions (or to attack the positions of his opponents). Several core principles emerged in the 1930s, and they became, almost reflexively, the yardsticks by which he measured virtually all political groups, ideologies, proposed laws, and investigative strategies: 1) he believed without reservation in the "marketplace of thought" as the core principle of democracy. Ideas should be subjected to scrutiny and debate, rather than suppressed or censored and in politics he distrusted any party, organization or system that did not permit the exchange of ideas and interfered with that marketplace; 2) he had a Brandeisian mistrust of monopolies, oligopolies, and cartels in the economic realm, and that extended to the communications realm as well, where he argued that more channels of communication for the distribution of information and ideas were more likely to produce better debates and decision making 3) he abhorred secrecy and anonymity because they were not subject to the illuminating and clarifying processes of the public scrutiny of ideas, and therefore hated political organizations that relied on secrecy (such as the KKK or the Communist Party); 4) over time he consistently embraced the idea of "disclosure" as the democratic solution to the problem of anti-democratic organizations and entities; rather than making such organizations illegal, which would drive them underground, he argued that their resources, leadership, and channels of communications should be disclosed to the public, so that rational, competent, citizens could make informed decisions.

<28> Although he did not necessarily apply these principles to his relationship with Hoover, the fact that he made common cause with J. Edgar Hoover is not, therefore, altogether surprising: Hoover had legitimate investigatory capacities and Ernst believed in the necessity of vigorous investigations of domestic subversives. Because Hoover had mastered the art of public relations, touting his FBI as a shining example of an organization committed to due process and police professionalism, the FBI compared most favorably with the highly partisan and reckless HUAC chaired by Martin Dies, for instance. And in the post-WWII era, Hoover certainly looked more respectable than HUAC chair J. Parnell Thomas, or the young Richard M. Nixon, or Senator Joseph McCarthy. For Ernst, Hoover's FBI was a beacon of professional integrity. Unlike others in the civil liberties community, Ernst appears never to have questioned Hoover or the FBI's self-promotional materials and virtually always took Hoover and his lieutenants at their word. [32]

<29> Among leading liberals Ernst was distinctive in forging what he thought was a close professional and personal relationship with Hoover. Indeed, one of the seeming ironies of his career is that this legal champion of cultural and sexual modernism became both a public champion of, and sometimes informant to, Hoover. In time, Hoover's secrecy and duplicitous techniques would come to symbolize the anti-democratic excesses of American anti-communism. However, Ernst not only vociferously denied the plausibility of such accusations, he did his best to protect Hoover and the FBI from such criticism by offering him advice, insider information from the ACLU, and high profile defenses in liberal and mainstream publications.

<30> Ernst's own writings from the 1940s to the 1960s and a long correspondence between him and Hoover (or Hoover's subordinates) show that Ernst became a dependable protector of Hoover and the FBI's reputation, and an informant as well. Based upon the FBI's files on Ernst, and the Ernst-Hoover correspondence in the Ernst papers at the University of Texas, Ernst provided Hoover with essentially inconsequential information, but the acts were still perfidious, such as passing on letters he received from others critical of Hoover, or alerting him that critical statements were forthcoming from the ACLU. His far more significant work was protecting Hoover's name and reputation, offering to defend Hoover whenever he was criticized, writing articles on behalf of the FBI that were vetted by Hoover and his staff, and essentially, serving as Hoover's high profile flak. [33]

<31> Based on my reading of the Ernst-Hoover correspondence in the Ernst papers at Austin and Ernst's FBI file, the following summarizes their relationship:

--Hoover was intensely interested in good public relations, and also had very thin skin. As a result, he felt that every criticism leveled at the FBI or against him needed to be addressed. Much of the correspondence in the Ernst papers covers strategies and lines of argument for meeting those criticisms.

* For specific issues, such as the FBI's uses of wiretapping or its unwillingness to reveal its sources, Hoover invariably wanted to meet the criticisms lodged by his highest profile critics. Ernst was more than willing to be involved in this: he would help Hoover construct responses, and would offer to answer those criticisms himself, thereby receiving from FBI background reports and studies, and even specific language to employ.

* Ernst made available to the bureau for vetting drafts of his articles in defense of the FBI. In one extended correspondence between Louis Nichols, Hoover's chief aide, and Ernst, Nichols essentially provided a paragraph-by-paragraph response to drafts of Ernst's 1950 Reader's Digest article on the FBI, titled "Why I No Longer Fear the FBI." Ernst, the champion of disclosure, was entirely willing to be a front for the FBI in publishing this article, never disclosing how closely he had worked with the FBI on this article.

* Similarly, the FBI would send Ernst draft materials of its own publications (such as annual reports) and he in turn would provide very detailed responses, especially making suggestions as to how the Bureau could represent its positions in ways more acceptable to civil liberties groups.

In general, Ernst continually suggested ways that the Bureau could represent its policy in the most democratic terms. He was attentive to the criticisms posed by others against the FBI, and sensitive to the FBI's need to represent itself in the most favorable light. Ernst clearly tried to make Hoover more attentive to civil liberties nuances, offering counsel on positions Hoover should or should not adopt. Whether he was effective is dubious, given Hoover's long record of abusing power and manipulating or withholding information at his disposal.

<31> But Ernst thought he was effective with Hoover, and represented himself this way to the liberal community. He routinely contended that his constant attention to the FBI had the effect of making it do its job better, forcing greater attention to due process matters. And perhaps it did - there are dozens of letters in these files where Ernst reported to Hoover that he has heard a complaint about FBI tactics, or its impolitic red-baiting language, or a due process matter, and he would ask for an explanation. He invariably received a quick reply from Hoover or one of his top lieutenants, but never with Hoover acknowledging any legitimacy to the complaint. Ernst would then respond to the originating critic stating the FBI's position almost verbatim.

<32> An illustrative case in point is a series of letters between Ernst and Hoover, and Ernst and The Nation's editor Freda Kirchway, about a two-part anonymously written article in The Nation in 1943, titled "Washington Gestapo," in which the FBI was severely criticized for its intimidating, intrusive activities with respect to civil service hiring. [34] Hoover gave Ernst information to form a response, and Ernst defended Hoover and the Bureau in The Nation. In a separate letter to Kirchway, he justified his watchdog role writing with typical hyperbole about the FBI's professionalism and his own role as monitor: [35]

For close to ten years I have kept a rather close eye on the FBI. I started scrutiny of FBI behavior because of rumors and gossip and suspicions that basic civil liberties were being violated. I am writing to you to let you know that I have yet to hear of a single proven case of violation of the basic civil liberties. This is close to a miracle. Out of 100,000 cases there has been only one complaint for what in the City of New York at least, we take for granted, namely, holding people incommunicado, third degree, etc.

Then, directly echoing Hoover's language, he adds:

The FBI is not perfect, nor is THE NATION. But I have yet to know of an instance where I brought a complaint involving matters of this nature to Edgar Hoover, and where the complainant and myself have not felt that we have received sympathetic understanding and proper administrative treatment of the situation…. I have been a pest to the FBI in picking them up on every possible complaint which has come to me. In time this has run to a considerable number. I believe its protection of personal liberty is one of the outstanding contributions to Civil Liberties in my time in the United States. [36]

<33> Maybe it is the case that Ernst did keep the FBI on the up & up, but from the tone of the FBI's internal notes, he appears to have been sadly mistaken in his perception of his influence. It was Hoover, not Ernst or the civil liberties community, or civil liberties in general, who reaped all of the advantages of the relationship. Hoover and his associates understood Ernst's value to them, and seem to have given him the perception of being useful and in the loop. [37] But I'm struck by how easily mollified Ernst was by Hoover's assurances, and by how non-skeptical he was. Perhaps, and I speculate here, he was easily seduced by the idea of having the ear of the nation's top cop, as he called Hoover.

<34> The result was not just a diminution of Ernst's prestige and reputation within the community of civil libertarians among whom he had been a leader. There was an ethical slippage as well, a sacrifice of his own standards of "disclosure" for the sake of serving power in the struggle against communism. This ethical slippage took place in his private, undisclosed relationship as a flak and a front for the FBI: He furnished the FBI with information about internal ACLU criticisms of the FBI, provided it with pre-publication information about critical works, and offered to refute those works in widely read publications. He even began clearing his own work with the FBI prior to publication, and worked closely with the Bureau on his 1950 book-length study, A Report on the American Communist. [38]

<35> As a civil libertarian, he defended disclosure as the most democratic tactic for dealing with potentially subversive groups, but he always defended the confidentiality of the FBI's files, never conceding that the FBI should disclose its methods and the information at its disposal. As a lawyer, he slipped as well: at the same time that he was publicly defending Hoover and the FBI, he was still seeking to defend clients whose lives were subject to FBI investigation. Perhaps the most compromising materials in the Ernst FBI files are letters indicating that when Ethel and Julius Rosenberg's family met with him about providing legal defense for the accused atomic spies, Ernst conveyed this information to Hoover. (Unfortunately, the "Julius Rosenberg" file was missing from Ernst's papers at the University of Texas, so I'm not able, as of yet, to find more evidence about the nature of this relationship. But based on the FBI files, it would appear to be a stunning ethical lapse, at the least). [39]

<36> What, then, to make of this? A generous interpretation is that he believed the carefully constructed public image of FBI as an organization of unimpeachable integrity and professionalism. And compared to the likes of Martin Dies or Parnell Thomas (and HUAC in general), or Senator McCarthy, or the host of red-hunters plying their blacklists, rumors and innuendos, Hoover seemed the very figure of responsibility. (It was not until the Church Committee Hearings of the mid-1970s and subsequent FOIA searches into Hoover's records that his dirty tactics became more than just generally ignored rumor). But Ernst played an important role in this image construction as well, and lent his considerable prestige to the perception of the FBI's reliability and integrity while doing his best to quash rumors and criticism of FBI impropriety.

<37> Ernst was never as influential after he became an active anti-communist as he was before. (The irony, of course, is that by aligning himself with Hoover he wanted to be exceptionally influential). He made his mark in American literary and legal culture in the 1930s, while still a relatively young man and he spent much of the rest of his career functioning not really as a champion of civil liberties, but rather as someone who once had been. Meanwhile, the due process-centered strategy for anti-communism never developed, and instead Hoover's critics, not his defenders, were proved right over time - the likes of J. Parnell Thomas and Joseph McCarthy seized center stage, J. Edgar Hoover worked on center stage and behind the scenes, and the civil libertarians were pushed to the wings, rendered rather mute by the sound and fury of it all.

 

Notes

[1] Conversation with Jonathan Rose, editor of Book History. The generalized arguments I make in this paper are based in reading thousands of documents in the Morris Ernst Collection in the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas, Austin (hereafter cited as MLE papers, HRC, followed by box and folder numbers), along with hundreds of documents I've examined related to Ernst's work in the records of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU records, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University). Specifically cited documents will be referred to in the text. [^]

[2] Among the many titles those treating obscenity censorship matters in particular include: Morris L. Ernst and William Seagle, To the Pure: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor (New York: Viking Press, 1928); Morris L. Ernst and Alexander Lindey, The Censor Marches On (New York: Doubleday, Doran & Co., 1940); Ernst, The First Freedom (New York: MacMillan, 1946); Ernst and Alan U.Schwartz, Censorship: The Search for the Obscene (New York: MacMillan, 1964). [^]

[3] Radclyffe Hall, The Well of Loneliness, New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1990 (originally published by Doubleday,1928). For Ernst's records on the case, see MLE Papers, HRC, vol 90. The case tried by Ernst, People v. Covici-Friede Inc., et al. was cleared in the court of Special Sessions, April 19, 1929. For additional records, see MLE files, HRC, box 740, folder 740.5, and HRC box 383, folder 383.12. For treatment of the legal trials of Well of Loneliness, see Vera Brittain, Radclyffe Hall: A Case of Obscenity? (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, 1968).

For Ernst's firm's correspondence and record of the legal materials surrounding the Ulysses case, MLE files, HRC, vol. 93. The full Ernst firm documentation on the Ulysses can also be found in Michael Moscato and Leslie LeBlanc, eds., Notes on the United States of America v. One Book Titled 'Ulysses' by James Joyce: Documents and Commentary – A 50-Year Retrospective, (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1984). See, Paul Vanderham, James Joyce and the Censorship: The Trials of Ulysses (New York: NYU Press, 1998). [^]

[4] Morris L. Ernst and William Seagle, To the Pure: A Study of Obscenity and the Censor, (NY: Viking Press, 1928; NY: Kaus Reprint Company, 1969). [^]

[5] For treatment of anti-censorship lawyers prior to Ernst, see David Rabban, Free Speech in its Forgotten Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), especially for his treatment of Theodore Schroeder; and Felice Flannery Lewis, Literature, Obscenity & Law (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1976) for her treatment of literary obscenity trials prior to Ernst. [^]

[6] For a rich history of obscenity law and print culture, see Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age, 2nd edition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 (1st edition, 1968). Along with Boyer, two other scholars especially note Ernst's role in the obscenity law cases, including Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica, 1920-1940 (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999), who celebrates Ernst's role in the battles against the censors, and Rochelle Gurstein, The Repeal of Reticence: America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art (New York: Hill and Wang, 1996) who is more critical in her estimation of the cultural legacy left by Ernst and other anti-censorship advocates. [^]

[7] For Ernst's work on sex hygiene and contraception matters, see HRC, MLE papers, vol. 90, and box 740, folder 740.5. On Ernst's relationship with Sanger, see Ellen Chesler, A Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1992). [^]

[8] My overview of Ernst's relations with the ACLU are based in the hundreds of documents I have examined in the American Civil Liberties Union files at Princeton University, Seeley G. Mudd Library (hereafter cited as ACLU files, Princeton) and MLE papers, HRC. For discussion of Ernst's relations with Baldwin and the ACLU, see Robert C. Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; Samuel Walker, In Defense of American Liberties: A History of the ACLU (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Alan Reitman, ed., The Price of Liberty: Perspectives on Civil Liberties by Members of the ACLU (New York: W.W. Norton, 1968). [^]

[9] My distillation of Ernst's core arguments are based in reading numerous trials briefs from his many Magistrate Court cases and his federal obscenity cases. Records for these cases are found in MLE papers, HRC, Volumes 90, 94-95. [^]

[10] See, Ernst, Too Big (Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1940) for a full articulation of his anti-oligopoly position. These commitments led him, for instance, to become counsel to the American Newspaper Guild, defending the right of journalists for collective bargaining. He was counsel to the Dramatists Guild and the burlesque theatre industry, fighting many battles with the Commissioner of Licenses in New York City over closings of both "legitimate" and burlesque theaters. He was a vocal critic of police brutality and use of the third degree. In a landmark civil rights and labor rights case he took Mayor Frank Hague of Jersey City to the US Supreme Court in opposition to Hague's ban of the CIO and the ACLU from holding public meetings in Jersey City. He helped found the National Lawyers Guild as an organization for progressive lawyers who felt unrepresented by the anti-New Deal rhetoric and segregationist policies of the American Bar Association, and served on the national legal advisory board for the NAACP, and was appointed a member of President Truman's Committee on Civil Rights. And throughout his career he was one of the most insistent critics of oligopoly conditions in the mass communications industries, paying special attention to consolidation of the radio and film industries, the decimation of locally owned newspapers by the newspaper chains, and unfair postal rates that unfairly hindered market access to small newspaper and magazines. He was especially attentive to what he regarded as bottlenecks to the "marketplace of thoughts," which he saw as direct threats to the flow of creativity and ideas necessary to a healthy democracy. [^]

[11] Ernst's FBI files, a nearly 1000 page file available through the Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Acts Section, FBI File number 94-4-5366, are a fascinating body of documents indicating Ernst's willingness to aid Hoover's purposes. For an excellent treatment of this correspondence, see Harrison Salisbury, "The Strange Correspondence of Morris Ernst & John Edgar Hoover, 1939-1964," The Nation, December 1, 1984, pp 575-589.

Ernst's published writings from the 1940s-1960s, and the long private/professional with Hoover reveal that Ernst became a dependable protector of Hoover and the FBI's reputation, and a surreptitious informant as well. The two most complete folders of Ernst-Hoover correspondence in the MLE papers, HRC, are in Box 99, folders 1&2: "J. Edgar Hoover & MLE 1/2/47-6/28/50, misc. corresp., RE: wiretapping, RE: loyalty program, etc." Many other boxes hold some correspondence. [^]

[12] See Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1998) for a wider ranging examination of Ernst's role within the world of anticommunism, and for a broader study of liberal anticommunism see Richard Gid Powers, Not Without Honor: The History of American Anticommunism (New York: Free Press, 1995; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998). [^]

[13] Numerous scholars examine the Hicklin standard and its application in the American courts. For an excellent overview, see Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children: "Indecency", Censorship, and the Innocence of Youth, New York: Hill and Wang, 2001. See also, Frederick F. Schauer, The Law of Obscenity, Washington, D.C.: The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., 1976, and Paul S. Boyer, Purity in Print: Book Censorship in America from the Gilded Age to the Computer Age, 2nd edition, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2002 (1st edition, 1968) [^]

[14] For an excellent treatment of the vulnerable audience question in obscenity law, see Andrea Friedman, Prurient Interests: Gender, Democracy, and Obscenity in New York City, 1909-1945, New York: Columbia University Press, 2000; see also, Marjorie Heins, Not in Front of the Children. [^]

[15] For an excellent treatment of the Comstock Act and contraceptive matters, and Comstock's public role in general, see Nicola Beisel, Imperiled Innocents: Anthony Comstock and Family Reproduction in Victorian America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), and Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles Over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Knopf, 2002). [^]

[16] In US v Harmon, 1892, the Comstock Act was challenged on constitutional grounds, namely that it interfered with First Amendment rights. But the federal court held that it was obvious that the First Amendment did not protect that which "outrages the common sense of decency, or endangers public safety." On Harmon, see Heins, Not In Front of the Children, and Schauer, The Law of Obscenity. [^]

[17] Volumes 90, 94-95 of the MLE papers, HRC, have the complete legal record of these cases. For some correspondence about them, see MLE papers, box 740, folder 740.5. Other Magistrate court cases Ernst defended against Sumner (and not always successfully), included Donald Henderson Clark's Female; Nathan Asch's PayDay; Clement Wood's Flesh; and Octave Mirbeau's Celestine. [^]

[18] U.S. v. "What Happens" documents are in HRC, MLE papers, vol 90. [^]

[19] For a fuller study of Sumner's raids on New York City booksellers, see Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds. [^]

[20] Volumes 90, 94-95 of the MLE papers, HRC, have the complete legal record of these cases. For some correspondence about them, see MLE papers, box 740, folder 740.5. [^]

[21] This passage is from Lewis Gannett's column, "Book and Things," from the New York Herald, December 29, 1933. [^]

[22] The records for US v Mary Ware Dennett, 29 Fed (2d) 564 [1930] can be found in MLE papers, HRC, Vol 86. For a full treatment of the Dennett case, see Constance M. Chen, 'The Sex Side of Life': Mary Ware Dennett's Pioneering Battle for Birth Control and Sex Education (New York: New Press, 1996). See also Leigh Ann Wheeler, Against Obscenity: Reform and the Politics of Womanhood in America, 1873-1935 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). [^]

[23] US v. One Book Entitled 'Contraception,' 51 F (2) 525, and US v One Book Entitled 'Married Love,' (48 Fed (2d) 821). MLE papers, Vol 90 , and box 740, folder 740.5. [^]

[24] The key birth control cases Ernst won in the federal courts include United States v. One Package of Japanese Pessaries, 86 Fed (2) 737; and US v. John P. Nicholas and US v Norman E. Himes, (97 Fed (2) 510). [^]

[25] For Ernst's work on sex hygiene and contraception matters, see HRC, MLE papers, vol. 90, and box 740, folder 740.5. On Ernst's relationship with Sanger, see Ellen Chesler, A Woman of Valor: Margaret Sanger and the Birth Control Movement in America (New York: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1992). For Ernst's resounding declaration that these were the implications of these cases, see Ernst to BCFA, 3/30/39, HRC, MLE papers, Box 363, folder 363.1. He wrote: "As you know, two Federal Circuit courts of Appeal have held in language so clear as to permit no misconstruction that the prohibitions of the Federal contraception laws do not apply to physicians in their legitimate efforts to save life and protect health, nor to the druggists who act as the physicians source of support….These decisions have been accepted by law by the only departments in the Federal Government that have anything to do with prosecutions for violation of the laws in question, and these departments operate on a nationwide basis. [Ernst's emphasis]

When the Attorney General, the chief law enforcement official of the United States, refused to ask the Supreme Court to review the decision in the One Package case, in effect he conceded its correctness and undertook to be bound by it. [and] We have been informed by counsel for the Post Office, both here in New York and in Washington, that the Post Office authorities consider legal the distribution by mail of contraceptive information and supplies when addressed to doctors and druggists…. I need scarcely point out that these rulings of executive department are not local matters confined to a particular circuit, but on the contrary reflect the existing national pattern." [^]

[26] For one of his studies of communism in the U.S., see Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, Report on the American Communist (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1952). See Ellen Schrecker, Many are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1998) for a wider ranging examination of Ernst's role within the world of anticommunism. [^]

[27] See Cottrell, Roger Nash Baldwin, and Walker, In Defense of American Liberties, for discussions of the ACLU's internal divisions over it positions in the many crises provoked by anticommunism, including charges by Congressman Martin Dies, Chairman of HUAC, that the ACLU was a communist front organization. [^]

[28] Here I'm distilling larger patterns from Ernst's work in the ACLU, as documented in the massive records of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU records, Seeley Mudd Library, Princeton University). Specifically cited documents will be referred to in the text. [^]

[29] Ernst letter to Roger Baldwin, 2/1/40, ACLU papers, Seeley Mudd Archives, Princeton University, box 75, folder 15. [^]

[30] Resolution enclosed with letter of Ernst letter to Baldwin, 2/1/40, ACLU papers, Seeley Mudd Archives, box 75, folder 15. [^]

[31] For a extended account of the ACLU purge, and one critical of Ernst without naming him directly, see Corliss Lamont, ed., The Trial of Elizabeth Gurly Flynn by the American Civil Liberties Union (NY: Horizon Press, 1968). [^]

[32] For Hoover's self-promotional successes, see Claire Bond Potter, War on Crime: Bandits, G-Men, and the Politics of Mass Culture (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998). [^]

[33] The two most complete folders of Ernst-Hoover correspondence in the Ernst Collection, HRC, are in Box 99, folders 1&2: "J. Edgar Hoover & MLE 1/2/47-6/28/50, misc. corresp., RE: wiretapping, RE: loyalty program, etc." Many other boxes hold some correspondence. In general, this section draws extensively on, and is a quick overview of materials in Ernst's FBI files, a nearly 1000 page file available through the Freedom of Information Act/Privacy Acts Section, FBI File number 94-4-5366.

For an excellent study of the Ernst FBI files, see Harrison Salisbury, "The Strange Correspondence of Morris Ernst & John Edgar Hoover, 1939-1964," The Nation, December 1, 1984, pp 575-589. [^]

[34] "Washington Gestapo," The Nation, by XXX, July 17, 1943, pp 64-66; and pt II, July 24, 1943, pp 92-95; Freday Kirchwey, "End the Inquisition," The Nation, July 31, 1943, p116-117; and IF Stone, "XXX and the FBI," The Nation, Sept 25, 1943. [^]

[35] There are many letters exchanged between Ernst and Hoover about The Nation articles in the Ernst Collection, HRC, Box 134, correspondence 1943, vol 29, folder 2. [^]

[36] Ernst's Aug 26, 1943 letter to Kirchway, Box 134, correspondence 1943, vol 29, folder 2, Ernst Collection, HRC. [^]

[37] Hoover to Ernst, 8/8/43, Box 134, correspondence 1943, vol 29, folder 2, Ernst Collection, HRC. [^]

[38] Morris L. Ernst and David Loth, Report on the American Communist (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1952). [^]

[39] Harrison Salisbury, "The Strange Correspondence of Morris Ernst & John Edgar Hoover, 1939-1964," The Nation, December 1, 1984, pp 575-589. Salisbury does a good job teasing out these implications from the Ernst-Hoover correspondence. [^]

 

Return to Top»

ISSN: 1547-4348. All material contained within this site is copyrighted by the identified author. If no author is identified in relation to content, that content is © Reconstruction, 2002-2016.