Fellow Travelers From Popular Front to Cold War

Our fervent hope is that accessing documents online will spur further interest and encourage researchers to come to Cornell’s Ithaca campus to use its paper and microfilm files. The collection known as IWO Case Files (#5940) focuses on the legal issues ensuing from the Insurance Department of the State of New York’s re-interpretation of an insurance regulation in order to revoke the IWO’s charter as a fraternal organization, thereby shutting down the organization. The Insurance Department’s strategy was based on an unprecedented broad reading of insurance law that categorized the IWO as a “hazard” due to its political affiliations. Its financial probity as a fraternal benefits society was not in question, although that was the ostensible reason for the Insurance Department’s ultimately successful effort to seize the IWO’s assets and liquidate it. The legal proceedings raised the question as to whether the IWO was in fact a bone fide fraternal order, since its political activities were clearly interwoven into its framework as a fraternal mutual benefits society with affiliated lodges. The case also raised the question as to whether an insurance regulator was exceeding its authority in attempting to legally liquidate a successful insurance operation for non-financial reasons.

By the late 1940s, repression in the U.S. had escalated as part of Cold War McCarthyism, including a “Red Scare” that targeted civil rights activists and a broad spectrum of leftists. The IWO was placed on Attorney General’s Tom Clark’s “Red List,” and its activists were placed under FBI surveillance. The rhetoric of that era continues to resonate, especially in discussions of the constitutional right to free speech and the right to avoid self‑incrimination.

Over two decades ago, law professor Arthur J. Sabin focused his energies on those IWO Case Files (#5940) and worked extensively with the Kheel Center and elsewhere to ensure that a solid legal history of the IWO’s battle with New York State’s Insurance Department would be written. The results of his research are well summarized in his Red Scare in Court: New York versus the International Workers Order (1993), offering insights into the IWO’s administrative hearing. That hearing was held near to where IWO members Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were put on trial on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage in what became a famous capital punishment case. Some legal materials relevant to the hearing are included here, as they were used in the IWO’s public and membership campaigns to defend itself, or to inform executive decision making.

At a time when the panic aroused by nuclear competition from the U.S.S.R. was attributed to spying, the Red Scare was lethal for some. Asserting Julius and Ethel Rosenberg's innocence as part of a broader, unsuccessful campaign to save them from the electric chair, the IWO insisted that the Rosenbergs were victims of antisemitism, a claim that many backed. It is clear that Ethel Rosenberg, in any case, was not guilty despite having been convicted of conspiracy to commit espionage and executed in 1953.

As part of U.S. officialdom's increased repression of perceived Communist influence, the IWO / JPFO's support for "the Party line, was broached in legal hearings even though the stances of its leadership had shifted over time. The IWO / JPFO had defended the Stalinist purges of the 1930s and supported the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact that divided Poland by ceding half of it to Hitler, a decision that provoked deep dissent within its ranks and leadership. But by mid-1941 the IWO / JPFO had become far more than a stalwart defender of FDR and a U.S. policy that supported a "second front" during World War II. It devoted its all to interracial cooperation in the fight Hitler. Its members were deeply aware of what Nazism meant for Europe's Jews, as well as for Roma, Slavs and others. Its American identity became reshaped in a world-wide fight against fascism fused with its advocacy for full armed forces integration.

During the Cold War, the organization ignored reports that Solomon (Shloyme) Michoels and others from the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee —the JPFO's erstwhile wartime ally— had been murdered by Stalin, an omission that affected membership. As the U.S. Cold War increasingly took its own dramatic toll, many who had joined the IWO / JPFO left, increasingly frightened when some members and leaders were investigated and lost jobs, and sometimes jailed, denaturalized, and/or deported for their beliefs or associations. Despite the Red Scare, the members who remained rallied around the IWO's deep commitment to civil rights and liberties that was tied to its defense of immigrants and fight against antisemitism.

The IWO / JPFO’s responses to the rapid crescendo of federal and state legal actions are reflected here, in its fight to remain a recognized part of American Jewish communal institutions which looked to expel it as part of the Red Scare. At the denouement of the legal struggle, the JPFO spun off its children’s schools and camp as well as its cemetery department to ensure that they were not fully shut down. The (Women’s) Emma Lazarus Division also became its own legal entity. It is clear that New York State and the FBI did not confiscate all organizational files; some were removed before the offices were raided in 1951. What is less clear is whether the Kheel Center’s holdings represent all files confiscated.

About 10,000 pages of documents from the Kheel Center’s collection of International Workers’ Order records have been digitized. You can find more of these documents here along with the full version of documents provided here.