Carl Marzani

KL AD my oT sa qd LN jN YP Fe qk

Carl Aldo Marzani was born in Rome, Italy, on 4th March 1912. The family emigrated to the United States in 1924 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. An extremely intelligent boy he won a scholarship to Williams College. Soon afterwards he became a socialist.

In 1936 Marzani won a place at Oxford University. However, on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War he joined the International Brigade and served under the anarchist leader, Buenaventua Durruti. By 1937 he was commanding a unit of the Durruti Column.

Marzani returned to university and graduated with a BA in Modern Greats, Philosophy, Politics and Economics in June 1938. He also joined the British Communist Party before teturning to the United States. He found employment with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and became a member of the American Communist Party and served as district organizer on the Lower East Side of New York. He resigned from the party in August 1941.

During the Second World War Marzani joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and between 1942 and 1945 served in the Analysis Branch. In 1945 Marzani transferred to the Department of State, where he worked as the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence. Marzani handled the preparation of top secret reports.

In 1946 Marzani founded Union Films to make documentaries for trade unions. In January 1947 Marzani was indicted for defrauding the government by receiving government pay while concealing membership of the American Communist Party. He was convicted on 22nd June 1947, and sentenced to thirty-six months in prison, in spite of pleas for parole by William Donovan, Albert Einstein and Thomas Mann.

On his release he published We Can Be Friends: The Origins of the Cold War (1952), a book that blamed Harry S. Truman for the Cold War. Marzani now went into publishing and established the company Marzani & Munsell. According to Marzani he specialised in books that upset the status quo.

Marzani refused to accept that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone-gunman who had killed President John F. Kennedy. He published several pamphlets on the subject. He also published Oswald, Assassin or Fall Guy? (1964) by Joachim Joesten. In the book Joesten claimed that the Central Intelligence Agency, Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Dallas Police Department and a group of right-wing Texas oil millionaires conspired to kill Kennedy. He openly accused Police Chief Jesse Curry of being one of the key figures in the assassination.

Victor Perlo, reviewing the book in the New Times , commented that the book had been rejected by several publishers before Marzani accepted it. "The firm deserves credit for publishing and promoting the book, so that thousands of copies were sold in a short time, despite a blackout by commercial reviewers. Publisher-editor Carl Marzani edited the manuscript brilliantly... This reviewer approached the Joesten book with skepticism. Despite my low opinion of the Dallas police and the FBI, I've had enough experience to know that utterly senseless things do happen in America... But the Joesten book erased most of my skepticism."

The book was largely ignored by the mainstream media but was reviewed by Hugh Aynesworth, a strong supporter of the lone gunman theory and a reporter with Dallas Morning News, in the Editor and Publisher. "Joesten, an ex-German who became a U.S. citizen in 1948... states that Oswald was an agent of both the FBI and the CIA (how's that for a 24-year-old who couldn't spell "wrist"?). It's the same old tripe with some new flavouring." Aynesworth uses the review to criticize Mark Lane, who was another writer questioning the idea that Oswald was a lone-gunman: "Lane is the troublemaker who spent two days in Dallas in January on his investigation and now pretends to be an expert on all aspects of the weird tragedy."

On the publication of the Warren Commission Report Marzini's old friend, I. F. Stone defended it in the I. Stone's Weekly, stating that "I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive." Stone then went onto to look at the role played by Marzini, Thomas G. Buchanan and Joachim Joesten, in the two books that had already been published arguing that there had been a conspiracy: "The Joesten book is rubbish, and Carl Marzani - whom I defended against loose charges in the worst days of the witch hunt - ought to have had more sense of public responsibility than to publish it. Thomas G. Buchanan, another victim of witch hunt days, has gone in for similar rubbish in his book, Who Killed Kennedy? You couldn't convict a chicken thief on the flimsy slap-together of surmise, half-fact and whole untruth in either book… All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report."

Carl Aldo Marzani died on 11th December 1994.

All my adult life as a newspaperman I have been fighting, in defense of the Left and of a sane politics, against conspiracy theories of history, character assassination, guilt by association and demonology. Now I see elements of the Left using these same tactics in the controversy over the Kennedy assassination and the Warren Commission Report. I believe the Commission has done a first-rate job, on a level that does our country proud and is worthy of so tragic an event. I regard the case against Lee Harvey Oswald as the lone killer of the President as conclusive. By the nature of the case, absolute certainty will never be attained, and those still convinced of Oswald's innocence have a right to pursue the search for evidence which might exculpate him. But I want to suggest that this search be carried on in a sober manner and with full awareness of what is involved.

The Joesten book is rubbish, and Carl Marzani - whom I defended against loose charges in the worst days of the witch hunt - ought to have had more sense of public responsibility than to publish it. Buchanan, another victim of witch hunt days, has gone in for similar rubbish in his book, Who Killed Kennedy? You couldn't convict a chicken thief on the flimsy slap-together of surmise, half-fact and whole untruth in either book.

Carl Marzani - History

Guide to the Carl Aldo Marzani Papers TAM 154

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive
Elmer Holmes Bobst Library
70 Washington Square South
10th Floor
New York, NY 10012
(212) 998-2630
[email protected]

Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives

Collection processed by Collection processed by Ilene Magaras, 2009. Edited for DACS compliance by Nicole Greenhouse to reflect the incorporation of nonprint materials and addition of unprocessed materials, Jan 2014.

This finding aid was produced using ArchivesSpace on April 24, 2018
Description is in English. using Describing Archives: A Content Standard

Historical/Biographical Note

Carl Marzani (1912-1994), Italian-American immigrant radical, was briefly a Communist Party, USA organizer on New York City's Lower East Side, served in the Office of Strategic Services during World War II and briefly thereafter in the State Department, was a political documentary filmmaker, the author of six books and numerous articles, and as an editor and publisher, first translated published portions of the work of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Marzani served almost three years in prison, from 1947-1950, for defrauding the United States by concealing his prewar Party membership during the period of his government employment. He lived and worked in New York City most of his life.

Carl Marzani was born in Rome, Italy, on March 4, 1912. Carl's father, Gabriel, was a Socialist, and the family emigrated to the United States in 1924, settling in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In America, Carl entered the first grade at the age of twelve. As his English improved, he became an outstanding student, and in 1931, Carl graduated from Scranton High School and received a scholarship to Williams College.

Once in college, Carl became an avowed Socialist. He joined the League for Industrial Democracy, and wrote stories that reflected his beliefs for the school's literary magazine: Sketch, of which he became editor of in his sophomore year. While still in college, Carl met the woman who would later become his first wife, actress Edith Eisner, whose stage name was Edith Emerson. Marzani graduated summa cum laude from Williams College in 1935, with a BA in English. After graduating, Carl went to New York to look for work, which was scarce due to the depression. In the summer of 1936, he received word from Williams College that he had been awarded a Moody fellowship to Oxford University.

At this point in his life, Carl considered himself a "mild radical". He knew little about Communism and had read nothing on Marxism. However, this changed on the way to England to attend Oxford in late August of 1936, when he read Trotsky's History of the Russian Revolution, which had a profound effect on him. In 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out, and it became known that Mussolini was backing Franco by sending planes and troops. In late 1936 through early 1937, Carl served as a member of the Durruti Column, the leading anarchist troops in Spain. He then returned to Oxford to complete his studies, and married Edith in Oxford on March 12th 1937. In June 1938, Carl received a BA in Modern Greats Philosophy, Politics and Economics. While Carl was in Spain, Edith became a Communist. Influenced by Edith, Marzani joined the British Communist Party, and became treasurer of the South Midlands district. In the summer of 1938, Carl and Edith left Oxford with $500 and hitch-hiked around the world, visiting India, Indochina, China, Japan, and Europe, and used their Communist contacts to meet Nehru and other important radicals.

In May of 1939, the Marzanis returned to America, where they moved to New York's Lower East Side. Having difficulties making ends meet, they were on relief, and later got jobs through the Works Progress Administration (WPA). Carl and Edith also both joined the Communist Party, USA, going under the names Tony Whales and Edith Charles. Marzani's WPA job was to work on income studies at New York University. From WPA, Marzani assumed an Assistant Instructor position, and was then promoted to Instructor. During this time, Carl was the district Organizer for the Communist Party on the Lower East Side. After the Soviet Union was invaded, the Communist Party set up a popular front anti-fascist organization, and wanted Marzani to become its director. Marzani agreed, but he resigned from the Communist party in August, 1941, because he felt he could not function in both capacities.

In early 1942 Carl resigned from his job at NYU and went to Washington to help the war effort. From 1942-1945 Marzani worked under Colonel William J. Donovan for the Office of Strategic Services in the Analysis Branch. On August 23, 1943, Marzani was drafted. He served two weeks in the military's basic training program in Virginia, and was then sent back to the OSS. Shortly after, his first child Judith Enrica (Ricky) was born. In 1945, he moved to the Department of State, where he worked as the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence. Marzani's most significant work was the preparation of top-secret reports for military leaders, taking complex statistics, and communicating the results in all media including films. He also picked the targets for the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, which took place on April 18, 1942.

In 1946 Marzani decided to leave government service, and founded and directed Union Films, a film documentary company that had contracts with United Electrical and other unions to do documentary films for them. The most important film Deadline for Action, a 40 minute documentary made for the United Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers of America (UE-CIO), placed major responsibility for the Cold War on the United States, linking this to the growing attacks on labor unions. The documentary was released in September 1946, five weeks before Marzani resigned from the State Department.

Despite Marzani's honorable service in the OSS, his past membership in the Communist Party and Deadline led to an eleven-count indictment in January, 1947 on charges of fraud -- receiving his government pay while concealing pre-war membership in the Communist Party. At this time, Edith found out that she was pregnant with their second child. On June 22, 1947, Carl Marzani was convicted in a Federal Court in Washington. The Appeals Court threw out nine counts the Supreme Court (granting a rare rehearing) split 4-4 on the last two. Marzani served thirty-two months of a thirty-six month sentence.

In prison, Marzani studied and made notes for a book, We Can Be Friends: The Origins of the Cold War(1952), showing how Truman started the Cold War. In September of 1947, Edith gave birth to their second child, Anthony (Tony) Hugh. In 1950, Marzani tried to smuggle out a manuscript that he was working on, but was caught, and placed in solitary confinement for seven months. During his stay in prison, Carl and Edith wrote extensively to each other. Edith ran Union Films, raised their two small children, supported Carl's mother, and battled with multiple sclerosis. Union Films folded in 1949, after being harassed by New York City with zoning violations and other restrictions.

After his release from prison in 1951, Marzani worked for the United Electrical Workers, as the Editor for UE Steward, a leadership magazine, until 1954. At this time he joined Cameron Associates, headed by Angus Cameron, a radical editor. Together they ran the Liberty Book Club (established 1948). One of the first books released was Labor's Untold Story, a history of the U.S. labor movement, published for the UE and reflective of its views. After Cameron left, the venture became Marzani & Munsell which operated the Library-Prometheus Book Club. Notable Cameron Associates titles included: False Witness, The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci, and Marzani's autobiographical novel, The Survivor.

In 1960 Carl and his first wife, Edith separated in 1961, and divorced in 1966. In 1966, he married Charlotte Pomerantz, a children's book writer. They had two children together. A daughter, Gabrielle Rose was born December 12, 1967, and a son, Daniel Avram, was born February 19, 1969. Also in 1966, Carl's publishing company, Marzani & Munsell, was destroyed in a fire. Carl then went on to purchase, renovate and rent four brownstones in Chelsea, Manhattan( a portion of one of these became his home). Marzani also wrote The Promise of Eurocommunism(1981), and a four volume autobiography, The Education of a Reluctant Radical(1992-1994).

In the late 1980s Carl's health declined. He died on December 11, 1994.

Musser, Charles. "Carl Marzani and Union Films Making Left-Wing Documentaries during the Cold War, 1946-1953." The Moving Image vol. 9, no. 1 (2009): 104-160.

The Unresolved Marzani Case

May 15, 2009

Subscribe to The Nation

Get The Nation’s Weekly Newsletter

By signing up, you confirm that you are over the age of 16 and agree to receive occasional promotional offers for programs that support The Nation’s journalism. You can read our Privacy Policy here.

Join the Books & the Arts Newsletter

Subscribe to The Nation

Support Progressive Journalism

Sign up for our Wine Club today.

I.F. Stone exposes the injustice of the government’s prosecution–or persecution–of a loyal citizen named Carl Marzani.

Washington, December 30

Under ordinary circumstances it is waste motion for the United States Supreme Court to grant a rehearing. The circumstances in the case of Carl Marzani are far from ordinary. This test prosecution of an obscure ex-government employee casts a lengthening shadow over past and future loyalty purges. The Supreme Court split four to four after hearing the appeal and announced on December 20, without opinion, that the ruling of the lower court had been affirmed. Affirmance flowed from the arbitrary rule that when the Supreme Court is evenly divided, the benefit of the doubt is given the court below rather than the appellant. The rule might more equitably work the other way. One dissenter on a jury is enough to block a conviction, an evenly divided court in criminal cases would seem quite as amply to indicate reasonable doubt.

The argument for rehearing in the Marzani case rests on circumstances which make one wonder whether the tie might not be resolved. In the first place, there would have been no tie had Justice Douglas taken part. For reasons unstated Douglas left the bench when argument in the Marzani case began. There are no obvious reasons why Douglas should not have participated he was connected neither with the justice Department nor with the State Department. Had he known the court would split evenly, perhaps he would have acted otherwise.

One of the justices who did participate in the decision was out of town on a speaking engagement when the Marzani case was argued. Had Justice Jackson declined to vote on the ground that he had not heard the oral argument, the vote would have been four to three. Perhaps in view of the issues left unresolved by the tie, Justice Jackson might be disposed to grant a rehearing. Certainly if he were sitting alone in a case, he would not think of making a decision without hearing argument.

In another case decided that same day Justice Jackson had previously taken unusual steps to resolve a tie vote in the court. In an opinion admitting grave doubts as to the propriety of his course Justice Jackson had intervened to cast the vote which finally enabled the court to hear argument on its jurisdiction in the war-crimes cases. Justice Jackson, as a participant in the Nazi trials at Nurnberg, expressed some qualms about his intervention in an appeal from the similar trials at Tokyo. He hoped that by voting to hear argument from counsel for Hirota and Doihara he might convince a clear majority of his fellow-justices that the United States Supreme Court had no jurisdiction over the international war tribunals. The somewhat irregular maneuver was successful. The justice who broke the tie in the Japanese cases was the justice who created the tie in the Marzani case.

No irregularity would be required to grant a rehearing in the Marzani case. There are compelling reasons for an effort to bring about a clear decision. To let the Marzani decision stand by a tie vote is to leave unresolved the contradiction between two United States Circuit Court decisions which laid down opposite interpretations of the law the Marzani case was intended to test. The question concerns a provision of the 1944 War Contracts Settlement Act suspending the statute of limitations until three years after conclusion of the war in fraud cases. The question is whether this applies only to war contracts and similar matters in which the government was defrauded financially or can be extended to any misstatement made in dealing with the federal government where there was no financial loss, as in the Marzani case.

On April 28, 1966 Carl Marzani was a speaker at the Herbert Aptheker Testimonial Dinner. The dinner was held on the occasion of Herbert Aptheker's 50 th birthday, the publication of his 20 th book, and the 2 nd anniversary of the American Institute for Marxist Studies. It was held in the Sutton Ballroom, The New York Hilton, Avenue of the Americas, 53 rd to 54 th Street, New York City. Most speakers, organizers and sponsors were known members or supporters of the Communist Party USA.

Marzani was also a sponsor of the event. [1]

Carl Marzani

Carl Aldo Marzani (4 March 1912 - 11 December 1994) was an American leftwing political activist and publisher. He was successively a Communist Party organizer, volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, United States federal intelligence official, documentary filmmaker, author, and publisher. During World War II he served in the federal intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the U.S. Department of State. He picked the targets for the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, which took place on April 18, 1942. Marzani served nearly three years in prison for having concealed his Communist Party membership while in the OSS.

Marzani was born in Rome, Italy. The family emigrated to the United States in 1924 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Carl entered the first grade at the age of twelve, not knowing English. He graduated from High School in 1931 with a scholarship to Williams College. There, Marzani became a Socialist and joined the League for Industrial Democracy. He began writing and became the editor of the school's literary magazine. In 1935 he got married to his first wife, Edith Eisner, an actress whose stage name was Edith Emerson. The same year, he graduated summa cum laude from Williams College with a BA in English. Marzani thereupon moved to New York. In 1936 he received a Moody fellowship to Oxford University.

When the Spanish Civil War broke out Marzani traveled to Spain to volunteer for the Republican army. He commanded troops the Durruti Column, a unit of the anarchist wing of the Republican forces, during late 1936 and early 1937. He soon resumed university studies and in June 1938 Marzani received a BA in Modern Greats, Philosophy, Politics and Economics from Oxford. The former anarchist supporter underwent a radical change in his ideology, joining the British Communist Party and serving as its treasurer of the South Midlands district. In the summer of 1938 Marzani and his second wife traveled around the world, visiting India, Indochina, China, Japan, and Europe, using Communist Party contacts to meet Nehru and others.

After their world tour, the Marzanis returned to the United States and went on relief, the New Deal term for government assistance and welfare. Eventually they got government paid jobs with the Works Progress Administration (WPA) while at the same time joining the CPUSA under false identities. Marzani joined the CPUSA 23 August 1939, on the day the Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed. As a WPA instructor at New York University, as served as district Organizer for the Communist Party on the Lower East Side of New York. After the German invasion of the Soviet Union in mid 1941, Marzani became director of a popular front anti-fascist organization, and resigned from the Communist party in August, 1941.

In early 1942 after the United States became involved in World War II, Marzani joined the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the predecessor organization of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Marzani worked under Colonel William J. Donovan from 1942-1945 in the Analysis Branch. A 1943 Venona Project decryption of Soviet espionage cable traffic reported on an American code-named Kollega ("Colleage"), recruited by Eugene Dennis, who later became CPUSA General Secretary. The message described Kollega as working at the "Photographic Section Pictural Devision" (sic), interpreted by the U.S. analysts as "probably the Pictures Division of the News and Features Bureau of the Office of War Information" (OWI). [ 1 ] Several authors have speculated that Kollega was Marzani, [ 2 ] [ 3 ] though it has been disputed. [ 4 ] In 1945 Marzani transferred to the Department of State, where he worked as the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence. Marzani handled the preparation of top secret reports.

In 1946 Marzani founded and directed Union Films, a film documentary company that had contracts with the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America and other unions to do documentaries. One film entitled Deadline for Action, was released in September 1946, five weeks before Marzani resigned from the State Department. The film blamed the United States for the Cold War.

In January 1947 Marzani was indicted for defrauding the government by receiving government pay while concealing CPUSA membership. He was convicted on 22 June 1947, but nine counts were overturned on appeal, while the Supreme Court split 4-4 on a rare rehearing of the last two charges. Marzani served all but four months of a thirty-six-month sentence.

In prison, Marzani began work on a book blaming President Harry S. Truman for starting the Cold War. Caught attempting to smuggle a manuscript out of prison in 1950, he was placed in solitary confinement for seven months. The book was published in 1952 as We Can Be Friends: The Origins of the Cold War.

Union Films went out of business during his stay in prison. After his release in 1951, Marzani edited UE Steward for the United Electrical Workers until 1954. The same year he joined Cameron Associates and partnered with Angus Cameron to run Liberty Book Club. Liberty Book Club eventually became Marzani & Munsell which operated the Library-Prometheus Book Club. In this phase of his career Marzani was a contact for the Soviet secret police agency, the KGB, and the KGB subsidized his publishing house in the 1960s, according to allegations made in 1994 by Oleg Kalugin, a retired KGB officer.

Marzani was one of the interviewees in Vivian Gornick's 1977 book, The romance of American communism. Like the other interviewees, Marzani was concealed by a pseudonym his was "Eric Lanzetti". [ 5 ] [ 6 ]

Carl Marzani

Carl Aldo Marzani (4 March 1912 – 11 December 1994) was an Italian-born leftwing political activist and publisher. He was successively a Communist Party organizer, volunteer soldier in the Spanish Civil War, United States federal intelligence official, documentary filmmaker, author, and publisher. During World War II he served in the federal intelligence agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and later the U.S. Department of State. He picked the targets for the Doolittle raid on Tokyo, which took place on April 18, 1942. Marzani served nearly three years in prison for having concealed his Communist Party USA (CPUSA) membership while in the OSS.

Marzani was born in Rome, Italy. The family emigrated to the United States in 1924 and settled in Scranton, Pennsylvania. Carl entered the first grade at the age of twelve, not knowing English. He graduated from High School in 1931 with a scholarship to Williams College. There, Marzani became a socialist and joined the League for Industrial Democracy. He began writing and became the editor of the school's literary magazine. In 1935 he got married to his first wife, Edith Eisner, an actress whose stage name was Edith Emerson. The same year, he graduated summa cum laude from Williams College with a BA in English. Marzani thereupon moved to New York. In 1936 he received a Moody fellowship to Oxford University.

After their world tour, the Marzanis returned to the United States and went on relief, the German invasion of the Soviet Union in mid 1941, Marzani became director of a popular front anti-fascist organization, and resigned from the Communist party in August 1941.

In early 1942 after the United States became involved in Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). Marzani worked under Colonel William J. Donovan from 1942 to 1945 in the Analysis Branch. A 1943 Venona Project decryption of Soviet espionage cable traffic reported on an American code-named Kollega ("Colleage"), recruited by Eugene Dennis, who later became CPUSA General Secretary. The message described Kollega as working at the "Photographic Section Pictural Devision" (sic), interpreted by the U.S. analysts as "probably the Pictures Division of the News and Features Bureau of the Office of War Information" (OWI). [1] Several authors have speculated that Kollega was Marzani, [2] [3] though it has been disputed. [4] In 1945 Marzani transferred to the Department of State, where he worked as the Deputy Chief of the Presentation Division of the Office of Intelligence. Marzani handled the preparation of top secret reports.

In later years, Marzani seems to have moved away from his Old Left roots. In 1972 he authored Wounded Earth, [7] a well-respected book on environmental matters, at that time an unusual interest for a man associated with orthodox Marxism. In a 1976 article for the periodical In These Times, [8] he spoke respectfully of the Club of Rome, a think-tank formed by a group of Italian industrialists in 1968 "it is a highly sophisticated group, the most thoughtful representatives of European capitalism". In a note appended to the article he commented "I have only two claims to fame : that I was the first political prisoner of the Cold War and that I wrote the first revisionist history of it." He continued to proclaim his newfound revisionism in his 1981 book The Promise of Eurocommunism. [9]

Early Life

Swiss psychiatrist Carl Gustav Jung was born July 26, 1875, in Kesswil, Switzerland. The only son of a Protestant clergyman, Jung was a quiet, observant child who packed a certain loneliness in his single-child status. However, perhaps as a result of that isolation, he spent hours observing the roles of the adults around him, something that no doubt shaped his later career and work.

Jung&aposs childhood was further influenced by the complexities of his parents. His father, Paul, developed a failing belief in the power of religion as he grew older. Jung&aposs mother, Emilie, was haunted by mental illness and, when her boy was just three, left the family to live temporarily in a psychiatric hospital.

As was the case with his father and many other male relatives, it was expected that Jung would enter the clergy. Instead, Jung, who began reading philosophy extensively in his teens, bucked tradition and attended the University of Basel. There, he was exposed to numerous fields of study, including biology, paleontology, religion and archaeology, before finally settling on medicine.

Jung graduated the University of Basel in 1900 and obtained his M.D. two years later from the University of Zurich.

A Man for All Seasons

Percy Brazil lives in Connecticut and is a director of the Monthly Review Foundation.

In recent years four remarkable and quite disparate stalwarts of the left have died, but not without each leaving his own quintessential and characteristic hallmark. Although each was profoundly different from the others, they had much in common for, as I will argue, their core was identical.

The four horsemen of the left were Paul Sweezy, Angus Cameron, Daniel Singer, and the subject of this review, Carl Marzani. I knew them all they were my close friends.

Sweezy, the son of a vice president of the First National Bank of New York, was born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey, where J. P. Morgan and other financial types lived. He went to Harvard and earned degrees in economics. While there, he became an enthusiast of the Boston Red Sox. Cameron was an American born descendant of Scottish Covenanters (Reformed Presbyterians). Singer was a Jewish, Polish, English, French, middle-European secularist. And Marzani was a sui generis Catholic, Italian-American firecracker.

What was it that they had in common? What was their core? Sweezy was a nonsectarian Marxist whose only political party involvement was with the Progressive Party of Henry Wallace. Cameron distrusted political parties although he too was a Wallace activist in the 1948 presidential race. Singer, a disciple of Isaac Deutscher, described himself as a Luxemburgian socialist, and Marzani was a Gramscian ideologue. Of the four, only Marzani had a flirtation with a communist party (the British Communist Party, 1937� and the Communist Party U.S.A., 1939�).

Marzani was born in Rome in 1912, attended Catholic school, and was at one time an altar boy at a Dominican monastery. He and his family migrated to Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1924. His father worked as a coal miner, a laborer on the railroad, and finally a presser in the garment industry. His mother was a knitting machine worker. Carl went to school in Scranton and, although he spoke no English when he arrived in the United States, six years later he was offered scholarships at Hamilton College in New York (for $190) and Williams College in Massachusetts (for $450). He accepted the latter.

His classmates included Richard Helms (who later achieved fame and notoriety in the CIA) and Herb Stein (who became chair of Nixon&rsquos Council of Economic Advisors). In the class elections of 1935, Helms was perceptively voted “most likely to succeed,” receiving 52 votes to 7 for Marzani. In the “most brilliant” category, Marzani won with 42 votes to 23 for Helms, and Stein got 19. Years later, Helms, who lied under oath before a Congressional committee, received a slap on the wrist. Marzani, on joining the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during the Second World War, withheld any mention of his earlier membership in the Communist Party. He did this with the full knowledge and acquiescence of the people involved in hiring him, all of whom were aware of his political past. The result was he was sent to prison for three years.

The story of how and when Marzani became a political activist is of great interest. As the most brilliant student of the year, Williams College sent him to Oxford University. He wanted to become a playwright, and at Oxford he immersed himself in drama (writing, directing, and producing plays). The August 4, 1938, 0xford Mail has a page describing a presentation of Chaucer&rsquos “Nonnes Preestes Tale,” with Professor J. R. R. Tolkein, and produced by Marzani. Hitler, Mussolini, and the Spanish Civil War made 1938 a year of ferment in Europe. I suspect the drama of those times made Marzani interested in politics, and he started attending Communist Party meetings at the university. He applied for, and obtained, membership in the British Communist Party. During the summer he vacationed in the south of France and crossed the border into Spain to see what was going on. He went to the front and joined up with the anarchist Durruti Column. The leaders of the column thought he was a Comintern agent and told him that he&rsquod better get out of the country. He was in Spain all of three days.

It turned out that he was at the same front as George Orwell, who came back from Spain a dedicated anticommunist. Marzani, however, came back from Spain a dedicated antifascist.

Nobody ever got rich being a lefty. Society rarely rewards such misguided souls. On the contrary, a pound of flesh is usually required, and each of our four stalwarts had to pay. At Harvard, Sweezy was passed over for appointment to a tenured professorship, despite Joseph Schumpeter&rsquos campaign on his behalf. Cameron lost his job as editor in chief at Little Brown. Singer left his job at the Economist in order to write Prelude to Revolution in 1968. Marzani was sent to prison for three years.

Nothing daunted them. Sweezy, who had already written the classic Theory of Capitalist Development, went on to write (with Paul Baran) Monopoly Capital, and with Leo Huberman founded Monthly Review in 1948. Harry Magdoff came on board in 1968 as coeditor of MR and together Sweezy and Magdoff wrote Reviews of the Month for MR, many of which were reprinted as pamphlets or collected into books.

Cameron spent ten years fishing, hunting, and writing books on the economy and globalization, and then started a publishing company (which Marzani later joined). Cameron also wrote the famous L. L. Bean Game and Fish Cook Book&mdashthe proceeds of which, he told me, enabled him to live a most comfortable life in old age and guaranteed his pleasure in a daily pre-lunch martini.

Singer went on to write three major works, The Road to Gdansk Is Socialism Doomed? and his last and defining book Whose Millennium? Theirs or Ours? He also was the European correspondent for the Nation for some twenty years. Gore Vidal wrote of Singer that he was “one of the best, and certainly the sanest, interpreters of things European for American readers.”

When Marzani came out of jail he decided to forego his ambition of becoming a playwright and would instead spend the rest of his life defending and promoting democracy. In the dark days of Truman, McCarthy, Jenner, Dulles, Parnell Thomas, and Eastland, he thought of himself as being part of the “American resistance.” This book, Reconstruction, is the fifth book of his extended memoirs, which are collectively titled, The Education of a Reluctant Radical. The preceding volumes, Roman Childhood, Growing Up American, Munich and Dying Empires, and From Pentagon to Penitentiary combine to describe not only his life but also his times&mdashwhat Eric Hobsbawm has called “the extraordinary and terrible world of the past century.” Marzani takes you through his own involvement in the Spanish Civil War and the Communist movement of the late 1930s and early &rsquo40s his work in the OSS during the war and on the staff of the U.S. State Department after the war his documentary filmmaking for the United Electrical, Radio & Machine Workers Union (UE) his indictment and trials all the way up to the Supreme Court his three years in jail and then his becoming a writer.

His first book was We Can Be Friends: Origins of the Cold War, followed by a semi-autobiographical novel, The Survivor, and a book on ecology, The Wounded Earth. Altogether, after coming out of prison, Marzani wrote eleven books, many pamphlets, essays in Monthly Review, the Nation, and In These Times, and a biweekly Letter from America in Ethnos, a Greek newspaper. He also made five documentary films.

Some have written that Orwell was the man of the century, but I submit that Marzani was a better man. When he was indicted in January 1947 his father was dead and his mother, a religious Italian immigrant woman without much formal education, was living with Carl and his family. She was terrified that her son might be sent to prison and cried inconsolably. Carl, in an attempt to mollify her, said, “All right, if you&rsquore going to break down I&rsquoll fix it. I&rsquoll go to the government and make a bargain. I&rsquoll tell them about my Communist friends.” His mother turned to him and cried out, “Oh, no. You can&rsquot, you can&rsquot do that.” It was the sanction Marzani needed, and he accepted his punishment. In contrast Orwell, who has been described as a supremely honest man, an honorable man, did not hesitate to inform on his friends to British intelligence. Which is more honorable? To go to prison, or to be a stool pigeon?

Italo Calvino, the renowned Italian journalist, resistance fighter during the Second World War, and one of the most important Italian fiction writers of the twentieth century, has written that Marzani was “The only man truthfully and completely in love with the United States&hellip.a unique man&hellipof hard coherence. He has succeeded in thinking in such a completely American idiom because he succeeds in making operative the enormous difference between Americans and Europeans.”

Those fortunate enough to have known Carl will remember that he was a conversationalist par excellence and a great raconteur. True to form this book is full of anecdotes about his encounters with such luminaries as W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham, Che Guevara, Fidel, Nehru, Ghandi, Gerhardt Eisler, Arthur Garfield Hays, Howard Fast, General Donovan, Henry Wallace, Chief Justice Vinson, Justice William Douglas, John Ford and many others. When he was jailed, more than a thousand prominent Americans signed a petition for his release, including three Nobel Prize winners (Einstein, Shapley, and Thomas Mann), and professors from Harvard, Amherst, Columbia, Yale, and Stanford. Also many clergy, lawyers, and writers such as Norman Mailer, Louis Untermeyer, and Millen Brand, and theater folk including Garson Kanin signed the petition. Why did all these people petition for his release? Well, simply because an enormous injustice had taken place.

It is instructive to consider the circumstances leading up to the Marzani indictment. After the Second World War, Congress enacted the False Claim Statute, which extended the usual statute of limitations and was intended as a means of prosecuting those corporations and businesses which had overcharged and defrauded the government during the war.

Marzani had already resigned from the State Department and had made a documentary for the UE. The movie, Deadline for Action, described how the J. P. Morgan Group controlled General Electric, U.S. Steel, and AT&T, and how the crippling of trade unions in 1919 had opened the doors to the pro-business administrations of Presidents Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover, and ultimately to the Great Depression. Leo Huberman called it “the best labor film ever made.”

General Electric bought eleven prints of the film, and it was reported that someone in corporate America had approached the Treasury Department seeking retribution. Apparently one of the lawyers on the staff of the Treasury Department came up with the theory that Marzani could be indicted for defrauding the government during the war, when he received a sergeant&rsquos pay in the OSS, for making a false and fraudulent statement by failing to disclose that he had previously been a member of the Communist Party. As Carl writes in this book, “The OSS was fully aware of my political past, before I was hired. All my superiors knew.” This has been confirmed by Professor Edward S. Mason of Harvard University who was the OSS representative in the intelligence arm of the Joint Chiefs of Staffs. Mason was responsible to General Donovan, and he had to approve Carl&rsquos employment.

There were eleven counts in the indictment, nine of which were thrown out. The remaining two had to do with the exit interview which Marzani had with a State Department officer, at which no notes were taken. The officer alleged that in the interview Marzani had denied his membership in the Communist Party. Marzani was found guilty. The Appeals Court upheld the conviction (despite a vigorous defense by Arthur Garfield Hays), and the case wound up in the Supreme Court. The Court at the time consisted of Chief Justice Vinson, and Justices Frankfurter, Black, Murphy, Rutledge, Reed, Jackson, Burton, and William O. Douglas. The Court split four to four, with Justice Douglas abstaining. A few weeks later the Court agreed to a second hearing of the case (only the eighth time in the history of the Court that it agreed to a rehearing). Marzani felt encouraged and believed that Douglas had changed his mind and was prepared to vote. When the Court reconvened, Douglas gathered up his papers and left the bench. Once again the Court split four to four, and Marzani went to jail.

Why did Douglas, a well known liberal who almost always voted with Black, recuse himself? It is believed that Douglas was positioning himself to be a presidential candidate in 1948 and did not want to be accused of being “soft on communists.” Apparently the Court was no less political then, than it is now.

As I have said, all of our four stalwarts were my friends. They were all quite different, but they all shared the conviction that the world can be and must be made a better place. They arrived at this conviction through different routes: Sweezy from a thoroughgoing analysis of capital Cameron through literature and simple humanity Singer as a journalist and historian and Marzani through politics and the struggle for civil liberties. I saw them frequently and visited with all of them when they were near the end of their lives. Sweezy, at age 93, was very much at peace and did not speak much, content to let his record and that of MR as a whole speak for themselves, but when I asked him what he thought of a certain radical thinker he was as sharp and critical as ever. Cameron told me that the great disappointment of his life was that he did not live to see the establishment of socialism in the United States. In the last week of his life, Singer said to me and my wife Gladys that humanity has for the first time in history, the ability to destroy itself, and may very well do so. (This view is echoed by Sir Martin Rees, The British Astronomer Royal, in his recent book, Our Final Hour, where he warns that humankind is potentially the maker of its own demise, and in this century.) Singer went on to say that to prevent such destruction of humanity it was essential for the people of the world to change the world system, and that unless someone came up with something better, he opted for socialism. He repeated a phrase that is now well known, “It is either one world, or no world.”

Marzani and I were very close friends for over forty years. He neither regretted nor apologized for his membership in the Communist Party. Like so many in those years, he was radicalized, not so much by left-wing ideology, as by the reality of the Great Depression&mdashbecause capitalism could not address the needs of the people of the world and it was not interested in doing so.

He left the party because of the arbitrary way it functioned, but chose not to follow the path of others who became professional anticommunists. Instead he chose the path of becoming an outspoken advocate of civil liberties, democracy, and a defender of human rights. This book which covers the period 1949� includes his “Prison Notebooks” (180 pages) which detail much of his life and activities in jail, and the events leading up to his indictment. In the last year of his life, Carl was quite ill, and he wrote and dictated much of this book while in bed. His wife, Charlotte Pomerantz Marzani, has marvelously and lovingly edited his words and, with the assistance of Carl&rsquos son Tony, has published this concluding volume of Carl&rsquos memoirs.

This book describes how he became a documentary filmmaker for the UE and then became editor of that union&rsquos newspaper, the U.E. Steward. He tells how he went on to become a book publisher (for both Liberty Book Club and Prometheus Books) and published and distributed books by Ring Lardner Jr., John Wexley, Claude Bowers, C. Wright Mills, Curtis MacDougall, Richard Boyer, Herbert Morais, Fred Cook, Rex Tugwell, Isaac Deutscher, Dalton Trumbo, William Appleman Williams, Alexander Solzehenitsyn, and W. E. B. Du Bois. That is quite a list.

Marzani also translated books. In 1957 he translated and annotated a collection of writings by Antonio Gramsci. The publication of The Open Marxism of Antonio Gramsci introduced Gramsci to the English speaking world. Carl spoke across the country for progressive causes. In addition to all this, he used his carpentry and plumbing skills to build the houses in which he and his family (and friends) lived: on Fire Island, in New York City, New Paltz, and Guanica, Puerto Rico. He was truly a man for all seasons.

There is an old adage that the essential meaning of life is to try and figure out who you are before you die. Carl told me that the reason he started writing his memoirs was so that he could figure out why he always ended up on the left. This book, and the preceding four, provide the answer. The complete memoirs of a remarkable life are now available. Now, to answer the initial question: What did these four stalwarts of the left have in common? Well, I will tell you swiftly. What they had in common was a core which they all shared, and that core, the very essence of their being is the soul of socialism.

Famous Weddings

Former Senate Majority Leader Mitchell (61) weds sports marketing executive Heather MacLachlan (35) at St. Bartholomew's Episcopal Church in New York City

Wedding of Interest

Dec 17 Actress Heather Locklear (33) weds Bon Jovi lead guitarist Richie Sambora (35) at The American Cathedral in Paris, France

Wedding of Interest

Dec 17 Queen of Pop Céline Dion (26) weds her manager Rene Angelil (52) at Notre Dame Basilica in Montreal, Canada

Actor Jason Hervey (22) weds Kelley Patricia O'Neill (27) President Clinton's brother Roger Clinton (37) weds 8-mo pregnant Molly Nartin (25) Billionaire J. Paul Getty Jr marries Victoria Holdsworth in Barbados

Accuracy in Media

As a student, Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan was so interested in the socialist movement that she wrote a thesis about its history in New York City from 1900-1933. But the history of the Progressive Party, which ran FDR’s former vice president Henry Wallace as its presidential candidate in 1948, helps bring the subject up to date and explains the current direction of the Democratic Party.

The Progressive Party was controlled by the Communist Party but efforts to work through the democratic process did not die out with its election defeat in 1948. Communists and “progressives” then targeted the Democratic Party for a takeover from within.

A semi-official history, in the form of the book, Gideon’s Army, was written by Curtis MacDougall, a professor of journalism at Northwestern University who also wrote Interpretative Reporting, a standard text in journalism schools for more than 50 years. MacDougall, who wrote critically (even in his journalism textbook) about efforts to expose communist influence in the U.S. Government, was himself a Progressive Party activist and candidate.

Not surprisingly, MacDougall’s influence was felt not only on generations of journalists, but on his own son, A. Kent McDougall, who was acknowledged in the 1972 edition of Interpretative Reporting as then being with the New York office of the Wall Street Journal and lending “valuable assistance” in its preparation. Kent came out openly as a Marxist after working at the Journal, where he said he inserted positive stories about Marxist economists and “the left-wing journalist I.F. Stone.” Stone, it turned out, was a Soviet agent of influence.

MacDougall’s 319-page FBI file, released to this journalist, revealed that he had a close association with the Chicago Star, a newspaper controlled by the Communist Party, and many different CPUSA front organizations. But the Star connection deserves special comment. The executive editor of the Chicago Star was none other than Frank Marshall Davis, a Communist Party member who would later become President Barack Obama’s childhood mentor in Hawaii and was active in the Hawaii Democratic Party.

In 1948, notes historian David Pietrusza, Davis’s Chicago-based paper, the Chicago Star, wholeheartedly backed Henry Wallace. That summer, he adds, the Progressive Party “apparatus” converted the paper into the Illinois Standard, thus enabling Davis to relocate to Hawaii on the advice of fellow Progressive Party activist Paul Robeson. Robeson, it turned out, was a secret member of the Communist Party.

It is significant that MacDougall’s history of the Progressive Party, Gideon’s Army, was published by Italian-born American Communist Carl Marzani, who served a prison term for perjury in falsely denying, while employed by the State Department, that he was a Communist Party member. His publishing house, Marzani and Munsell, was subsidized by the Soviet KGB.

However, the history of the “progressive tradition” issued by the Center for American Progress (CAP) ignores all of this. It claims:

“With the rise of the contemporary progressive movement and the election of President Barack Obama in 2008, there is extensive public interest in better understanding the origins, values, and intellectual strands of progressivism.

“Who were the original progressive thinkers and activists? Where did their ideas come from and what motivated their beliefs and actions? What were their main goals for society and government?

“The new Progressive Tradition Series from the Center for American Progress traces the development of progressivism as a social and political tradition stretching from the late 19th century reform efforts to the current day.”

Unfortunately, this series ignores the role of the Progressive Party of 1948 and the Communist Party influence in it.

The book, The Power of Progress, written by CAP President John Podesta (with John Halpin), is a bit more open and honest. It does mention the communist influence in the Progressive Party, noting the “perceived tolerance of communists within the 1948 Progressive Party” and quoting leading liberals such as Arthur Schlesinger as saying that “the political tolerance of an illiberal creed like communism, coupled with progressives’ earlier isolationism, could not hold during a time of ideological struggle with a spreading Soviet empire.”

But the use of the word “perceived” is interesting.

It is important to note that Podesta apparently does not regard communism as an “illiberal creed.” After all, Podesta strongly defended communist Van Jones, before and after he was fired by the White House.

Podesta’s book goes on to say that “The practical application of many of these fiercely anti-communist positions quickly became problematic for many progressives” because of the loyalty reviews ordered by President Truman and “the overt Red-baiting of Joe McCarthy and [FBI Director J. Edgar] Hoover…” The loyalty reviews were designed to make sure that government employees were loyal Americans and not sympathetic to communism.

Why the use of the term “fiercely” anti-communist? Can one be too strongly opposed to an ideology that has resulted in 100 million deaths?

Also notice how Democratic President Harry Truman has become a villain in the Podesta narrative, sharing equal billing with the “Red-baiting” Senator McCarthy and the FBI director. Such a formulation displays the ideological shift in the Democratic Party.

This is more evidence of how modern “progressives” have broken with the anti-communist liberal tradition.

The Van Jones Scandal

This attitude explains not only why Obama-friendly progressives associate openly with characters such as Van Jones but why the Obama Administration is virtually silent on the human rights violations and the pro-terrorist foreign policy of the Marxist Hugo Chavez regime in Venezuela..

Podesta notes in matter-of-fact language that “President Truman adopted a strong stance against communist expansion, first with the Truman Doctrine, which offered economic and military support to Greece and Turkey in repelling Soviet ambitions, and shortly thereafter with the Marshall Plan, which provided $13 billion to help rebuild the economies of Europe and prevent the rise of communism still in ruin from the war.”

But Podesta writes critically when he says that the “hard line of liberal thinking”—that, is, liberal anti-communism—took the form of “Vowing never to bend to communist aggression anywhere in the world” and President Johnson’s escalation of the war in Vietnam.

Podesta writes this as if he had been willing to consign Vietnam to the communist camp from the beginning. Not only that, but he writes that the liberal anti-communists “firmly rejected the belief that there could be any acceptance of domestic communism within the larger liberal project.”

This, then, is quite explicit and revealing. Judging by Podesta’s embrace of communist Van Jones, it is clear that he—and CAP—currently accept communists as being part of “the larger liberal project.”

This helps explain why a CAP history of the progressive tradition would ignore the lasting influence of Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and how communists continue to work and operate in the “progressive” movement and even influence their hero, President Obama.

Far beyond mere tolerance, however, the communists ran Henry Wallace as the Progressive Party candidate for President in the1948 presidential election. A 1948 Communist Party election manifesto declared that “…in 1948 we Communists join with millions of other Americans to support the Progressive ticket to help win the peace. The Communist Party will enter its own candidates only in those districts where the people are offered no progressive alternatives to the twin parties of Wall Street.”

“In reality, many Communist Party operatives were in control of the Progressive Party. Before it was even formed the Communist Party merged two of its front organizations, the National Citizens Political Action Committee (NC-PAC) and the Independent Citizens Committee of the Arts and Sciences, to form the Progressive Citizens of America (PCA), which became the organizing tool for the Wallace campaign.”

Obama Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan’s 1981 thesis at Princeton University was titled “To the Final Conflict: Socialism in New York City, 1900-1933.” However, she wrote that “In our own times, a coherent socialist movement is nowhere to be found in the United States.” This appears to be a comment on modern-day America, at least as it was in 1981.

Kagan’s verdict, of course, depends on how you define “socialist.” The modern socialist movement calls itself “progressive.”

Kagan’s thesis is well-researched and interesting, but only to a point. Professor Harvey Klehr told me:

“I scanned through Kagan’s undergraduate thesis. It is very well-written and well-organized, a very impressive piece of undergraduate writing. It is also pretty sound academically. She considers a variety of answers to the question that has perplexed lots of scholars like myself—and radicals—why no successful radical movement in America? Looking at the fate of the SP [Socialist Party] in NY is an interesting take on the problem and I thought her account was reasonably convincing. She seems to have used appropriate sources—although the footnotes were not attached to the version you sent, so I can’t tell exactly which ones she consulted. But it sounds as if she was pretty thorough.

“Although it is not pervasive, I sensed a lurking sympathy for the ‘left-wing’ of the SP, as representing a more militant and pure opposition to the depredations of the manufacturers and the inequities of the system. She acknowledges, however, the faults and flaws of both factions and makes clear that the Communists’ own disastrous policies helped destroy the radical movement in the ILGWU [International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union]. The conclusion bemoans the lack of unity that destroyed this radical movement and hints that that is one of the major factors in the failure of American radicalism. Not surprising coming from a 21-year-old college student.

“So, I would give her a pretty good grade for an impressive piece of scholarship for an undergrad. And, I don’t see anything here like a ‘red flag’ in regard to her present situation.”

Clearly, the “red flag” is not a 1981 college paper but why she is being pushed for a seat on the Supreme Court in 2010. The alleged “failure of American radicalism,” perhaps appropriate for a paper that covers 1900-1933 and written in 1981, is not so apparent these days.

Consider that, after his resignation from his White House job, Podesta declared that Van Jones “is an exceptional and inspired leader who has fought to bring economic and environmental justice to communities across our country.” When Jason Mattera staged an ambush interview and confronted Podesta about hiring Jones, Podesta replied, “Van Jones is trying to make this country a better place.”

If Podesta, who ran Obama’s transition team with Valerie Jarrett, is serious about these comments, then the “progressive” movement has become something that represents a sharp break with the liberal anti-communist tradition. It is no wonder that CAP doesn’t want the public to understand how communists once dominated the “progressive” movement and still manipulate it to this day.

Cliff Kincaid

Cliff Kincaid is the Director of the AIM Center for Investigative Journalism and can be contacted at [email protected]. View the complete archives from Cliff Kincaid.

Ready to fight back against media bias?
Join us by donating to AIM today.