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Red Scare

Top FDR Advisor Isador Lubin Accused of Pro-Soviet Views

When Isador Lubin walked out of the Federal Trade Commission building in Washington, D.C., on March 16, 1950, he must have been exhausted but relieved. The ordeal had ended.

While waiting for the baleful day, he thought he would go crazy. Now, he may have felt some pleasure in his performance and those of his witnesses.

Isador Lubin was, until his death in 1978, one of the country’s leading economists and statisticians. He rose to great influence in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman. A member of Roosevelt’s White House inner circle of advisers during World War II, he represented the U.S. government at the U.N. during the Truman administration.

Isador Lubin

And yet the Loyalty Review Board held a hearing to determine Isador Lubin’s loyalty to the U.S. government.

His goal throughout his ordeal before the loyalty board was to secure ‘unequivocal vindication’ of his ‘devoted loyalty and patriotism.’

Loyalty Board

Isador Lubin belonged to the thousands of government employees who appeared before a loyalty board between 1947 and 1953. Appointed the U.S. member on the United Nations Economic and Employment Commission in late 1946, he became subject to Executive Order 9835. Signed by President Truman on March 21, 1947, the order required a loyalty investigation of every person in or entering the federal government.

The order also created a Loyalty Review Board under the Civil Service Commission.

The Truman administration created the loyalty program to respond to public fears, stoked by the Republican party, that Communists had infiltrated the government. The loyalty program screened more than 4.7 million government employees for loyalty.

Lubin’s years of public service in the Roosevelt and Truman administrations did not protect him from charges of disloyalty.

Isador Lubin

He was born in Worcester, Mass., on June 9, 1896, to Jewish immigrants. His father, Harris Lubin, for many years a peddler, operated a clothing store. In 1930, the business was nearly pulled under by the Depression.

He graduated from Clark University in 1916 and then went on to do graduate work at the University of Missouri. There he worked with and befriended economist Thorstein Veblen, a harsh critic of capitalism.

Lubin then taught at the University of Michigan, the University of Missouri and the Brookings Institution. He also advised two U.S. Senate committees.

Statistician Isador Lubin with statistics

From 1933 to 1946, he served as U.S. commissioner of Labor Statistics under Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. In that position, he reorganized how the bureau gathered information on employment, manufacturing, and the cost of living. Known as Roosevelt’s ‘favorite economist,’ Lubin served as his special statistical adviser from 1941 to 1945. In that position he assembled and interpreted statistics on American and British manufacturing production.

The Communist Threat

In March 1945, Roosevelt, shortly before his death, appointed him head of the U.S. delegation to the Allied Reparations Commission. The commission, which met in Moscow, was to develop a program of German reparations with Britain and the Soviet Union.

In January 1946, with the commission’s work finished, Lubin resigned from the Truman administration. He became president of a theatre auditing company owned by Hollywood movie studios. But he quickly found the world of private business much less satisfying than government work. At the end of the year, he returned to the administration.

Like most Americans, Lubin had deep concerns about Communist influence in the government. For that reason, he may have joined the liberal, anti-communist Americans for Democratic Action in 1947.

What he thought about the loyalty program is not known. Whatever objections to it he privately harbored, they were not compelling enough for him to quit the administration.

Moreover, he may have believed the mandatory loyalty investigation was a formality in his case. The FBI had investigated him in 1941-42 and found no wrongdoing or misconduct.

The Investigation

The FBI kept tabs on Isador Lubin, however, updating its file on him every so often. A report from 1947 found “considerable information. . . which would suggest Communist or pro-Soviet sympathies.”

“It appears that Lubin has associated with a number of persons having Communist tendencies, as well as with persons suspected of involvement in Soviet espionage activities,” the report said.

On the strength of the FBI’s information, the Justice Department recommended a full field investigation of him. Launched in September 1948, the FBI interviewed his friends, neighbors, government colleagues and acquaintances.

The FBI sent the results of the investigation — a series of field reports — to the Civil Service Commission in December 1948. While the reports contained abundant material complimentary to Lubin, they also contained derogatory information.

Faced with conflicting information, the Loyalty Review Board panel assigned to Lubin’s case could not reach a ‘definite conclusion’ on his loyalty. The panel split over whether the FBI’s information furnished “reasonable grounds” for believing Lubin disloyal. It was, however, unanimous in thinking he was “unsuitable” for government employment.

Meanwhile, the White House pressed the Board for a recommendation on what action, if any, it should take against Lubin.

The panel looked to two persons the FBI had interviewed for help in making a final judgment. One was a longstanding FBI confidential informant. But the bureau refused to make her available to the panel or provide information on her. The other declined to help.

Stymied, the panel saw one way forward: notify Lubin of the charges against him and go into them in a hearing.

The Charges

Lubin learned of the charges, perhaps for the first time, on October 21, 1949, in a letter from the chairman of the Loyalty Review Board.

They were compiled from his FBI file and the FBI’s investigation. He had associated with groups on the attorney general’s list of subversive organizations. Lubin had ‘expressed contempt and hatred for the United States and for Americans.’ And he had ‘stated unequivocally’ in the presence of ‘high Russian officials’ in 1945 that the U.S. would go into a a severe depression.

Lubin’s claim of a depression, the letter said, influenced Soviet foreign policy toward the U.S.

The most important charges appertained to his actions as a member of the American delegation to the reparations commission. During the negotiations, he ‘openly advocated the Russian cause and attempted to influence the Committee [U.S. delegation] toward a sympathetic understanding of the Soviets.’

He also tried to secure ‘favorable commitments for the Soviets by excluding American claims or, at most, to obtain only token reparations for American claims.’ He had unauthorized contact with the Soviet delegation. His attitude ‘raised doubts’ among his fellow delegates as to which side he supported in the negotiations.

Edwin Pauley

The charges undoubtedly shocked Isador Lubin. He correctly connected charges involving the reparations commission to Edwin W. Pauley. The oilman and former treasurer of the Democratic Party had replaced him as head of the U.S. reparations delegation after Truman became president. Lubin and Pauley had deeply disagreed over several aspects of the reparations problem.

Unbeknownst to Lubin, Pauley first made his allegations to the FBI in September 1945. During its recent investigation, the FBI interviewed him several times. The panel wanted to interview him, but he refused.

Their disagreement reflected their different backgrounds and temperaments. But more fundamentally, it showed their differing assessments over whether Germany or the Soviet Union represented the greater threat to peace.

For Lubin, it was Germany. For Pauley, it was the Soviet Union.

Pauley interpreted Lubin’s anti-German attitude to mean he was pro-Soviet.

The Hearing

March 16, 1950 was a cold day in Washington. At the Federal Trade Commission building, Lubin’s attorney Robert P. Patterson joined him.

Patterson was a friend and former Undersecretary of War in the Roosevelt administration and Secretary of War in the Truman administration.

Lubin had some idea of how the hearing would work. He had served as a witness at a friend’s hearing in 1948.

His fate rested with Dr. Burton L. French, a former congressman; John K. Clark, former president of New York State Law Examiners; and Dr. Meta Glass, former president of Sweet Briar College. If they decided he was disloyal, he stood to lose more than his U.N. job. His reputation would be destroyed and his nearly 20-year government career over.

No transcript exists of the hearing, but the strategy Lubin and Patterson employed is clear: prove his loyalty. They focused first on planting in the panel’s mind an image of Lubin’s character. They relied on witnesses and affidavits from prominent members of the Roosevelt administration.

Friends in High Places

The witnesses swore to ‘his excellent moral character, his high sense of honor, his trustworthiness.’ Those who spoke on his behalf included U.S. Sens. Herbert Lehman and Paul Douglas, as well as Ambassador W. Averell Harriman,

They also included Congressman Jacob Javits, Perkins, former presidential Press Secretary Jonathan W. Daniels, and former director of the OSS William J. Donovan.

Lubin then took the panel through a well-rehearsed account of his upbringing, education, employment, political activities, religious and professional affiliations, and philanthropy. Along the way, he played up his anticommunism, opposition to the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, support of American institutions and economic system, and his wartime work.

The charges that were the basis for the hearing were dealt with last. Lubin’s associations with the organizations on the attorney general’s list were explained away as favors to a friend or was acceptable because of the presence of prominent public figures on their boards. To refute the reparations charges, Lubin and Patterson used, in addition to Lubin’s testimony, the memoirs and accounts of those who knew intimately the Roosevelt administration’s reparations policy. They also used the testimony and affidavits of government officials who participated in or observed the Moscow reparations negotiations.

Isador Lubin with Eleanor Roosevelt.

Postscript

Lubin’s and Patterson’s strategy carried Lubin safely through the hearing, as he learned a few weeks later. The panel then cleared him of disloyalty.

Clark, the panel’s chairman, told Patterson that the ‘board had never seen such an array of distinguished witnesses.’ He also said, that ‘from the outset there had never been the slightest doubt in the minds of the panel’ as to Lubin’s loyalty.

And so Isador Lubin got the vindication he wanted.

President Truman held Lubin in high regard. In May 1950, after reading the FBI’s reports and the panel’s transcript of the hearing, concluded Lubin was loyal and that no action should taken against him.

Following the president’s lead, the Civil Service Commission declared Lubin eligible for government employment.

The Civil Service Commission then declared him eligible in June for government employment.

Lubin continued to represent the Truman administration at the U.N. until 1953.

Isador Lubin never spoke openly about the investigation or his loyalty board hearing, as far as is known. He made an indistinct reference to the hearing in one of his oral histories.

There are many possible reasons why he did not say more about them. Perhaps the experience was too painful, embarrassing, and humiliating. To discuss it would involve reliving the ordeal all over again. And it might even raise new questions about his loyalty.

This little-known but important episode in Isador Lubin’s life belongs to the larger story of his life that will one day be told.

The author of this story is Francis Wyman. He has worked in advancement systems at the Boston Athenaeum, Boston College, and Wentworth Institute of Technology. He is researching Lubin for a possible biography of him. For source material for this story, click here.

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Sacco and Vanzetti, Guilty After All?

When a judge sentenced two Italian anarchists named Sacco and Vanzetti to die for a crime they said they didn’t commit, an international furor erupted.

Many believed Sacco and Vanzetti guilty of only two things: foreign birth and radical beliefs. The eyes of the world then focused their home, Boston’s North End, during their trial, conviction and appeals. Protesters demonstrated in major cities around the world. A petition demanding a new trial had 600,000 signatures and celebrities wrote letters begging for clemency.

One of those celebrities, muckraker Upton Sinclair, decided to write a novel about the case. But by the time he finished the book, called Boston, Sacco and Vanzetti had died. And Sinclair believed them guilty.

Sacco and Vanzetti

On April 15, 1920, two men shot and killed Alessandro Berardelli and Frederick Parmenter in cold blood. A paymaster and guard for the Slater and Morrill Shoe Co., they were carrying the company payroll through the streets of Braintree, Mass. The two armed robbers grabbed the loot, more than $15,000, and fled in a getaway car.

Several weeks later, police arrested Nicolo Sacco, a shoemaker, and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, a fishmonger, on a streetcar. They had no police record, but they did carry loaded guns. Their trial then began the next June.

Sacco and Vanzetti

Red Scare

The crime took place during the Red Scare, a time of heightened fears about foreign terrorists.

In the spring of 1919, Italian anarchists tried to bomb political and business leaders throughout the United States. In April and in June they delivered 45 bombs to such prominent men as John D. Rockefeller, J.P. Morgan, Jr., and U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer. Only some of the bombs detonated, killing two and injuring two.

But one bomb nearly killed Palmer and it demolished his house. Palmer responded throughout 1919 and 1920 by having thousands of people arrested just on suspicion of radical activity. Some who got caught up in his dragnet had done nothing but talk with an accent.

But Palmer got hundreds deported.

Anarchists then retaliated with bombings at U.S. embassies and on Wall Street, which killed 38 people.

Death Sentence

In Boston, the judge handed down the death sentence to Sacco and Vanzetti. Many viewed the trial as tainted by prejudice against Italians. Felix Frankfurter, then a Harvard Law School professor, said the judge handled the case with ‘misquotations, misrepresentations, suppressions and mutilations.’

Sacco and Vanzetti became a cause celebre around the world. For the next six years, newspapers carried stories of efforts to save their lives. Protesters demonstrated on their behalf in major cities on every continent but Antarctica.

Portrait of a young muckraker

Upton Sinclair

In 1927, Upton Sinclair had a reputation as a bestselling writer and a Socialist. His novel The Jungle had exposed conditions in the meatpacking industry and led to the federal Meat Inspection Act.

Sinclair joined in the chorus from to stay the execution of Sacco and Vanzetti.

He called their conviction, ‘the most shocking crime that has been committed in American history since the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.’

Sinclair had worked undercover for seven weeks in a meatpacking plant to write The Jungle. In researching his novel about Sacco and Vanzetti, Sinclair spent six weeks in Boston gathering material. He interviewed Vanzetti, attended a funeral, got the court transcript, interviewed reporters and sent hundreds of letters to verify facts.

As he wrote the novel, his doubts grew about their innocence. Then on Aug. 23, 1927, Sacco and Vanzetti died in the electric chair in Charlestown State Prison.

Anthony Arthur, in his biography, Radical Innocent: Upton Sinclair, recounted how the author discovered that Sacco and Vanzetti had committed the murders.

One of their lawyers, Fred Moore, told him they had done it — but that the whole legal system was corrupt.

“Alone in a hotel room with Fred, I begged him to tell me the full truth,” wrote Sinclair. “He then told me that the men were guilty and he told me in every detail how he had framed a set of alibis for them.”

Wonder and Doubt

Knowing their lawyer believed in the guilt of Sacco and Vanzetti, Sinclair didn’t know what to do. He called it the most difficult ethical problem of his life.

In the end, he left the reader of Boston uncertain – ‘to wonder and doubt,’ in his words — about their guilt or innocence. He believed that an unjust system condemned Sacco and Vanzetti as anarchists and foreigners from the start.

Sinclair hoped to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction that year, 1929, but lost out to Julia Peterkin’s Scarlet Sister Mary.

Boston, By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=13436452. This story was updated in 2022.

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The Missing Kennebunkport Mural of the WPA

Towns and cities across America are dotted with WPA-era murals. Many of them pay tribute to the working classes of America. But not Kennebunkport. It had its WPA mural torn out of the local post office because critics thought a beach scene inappropriate for the town.

The Kennebunkport mural before its removal

Franklin Delano Roosevelt designed his Works Progress Administration program to lift the country from the Great Depression. It created millions of jobs for unemployed men and women. His jobs program included 5,000 artists commissioned to create works of art – many of them on the walls of post offices and other government buildings.

Kennebunkport Mural Fight

Exactly why people despised the Kennebunkport mural depends on when and who spoke about it. Two authors led the public crusade to have it removed. Booth Tarkington, an Indiana novelist and playwright, summered in Kennebunkport. Kenneth Roberts, a Maine writer of historical novels, speculated in Florida land.

Tarkington, an outspoken critic of FDR and his New Deal, acted as point man on the crusade against the mural. (Tarkington also hated automobiles). Roberts then got involved to give a local face to the fight.

Maine U.S. Sen. Wallace White, Senate minority leader, brought the matter to the floor of the Senate. He moved to allow the mural’s replacement four years after its installation.

“The mural is a picture, which, to speak frankly, depicts a number of fat women, scantily clad, disporting themselves on a beach,” White said.

“It has been an offense to the citizens of that community ever since it was placed in the post office. In fact, it has been so much of an offense that the people of the community raised something in excess of $1,000 to have painted a mural which depicts historically the seafaring and shipbuilding activities of the community.”

The Kennebunkport Post Office, built in 1940.

No Bulges Here

Maine’s other U.S. senator also weighed in. “Our only objection was that the murals depicted feminine forms absolutely foreign to the great state of Maine. Our Maine women do not bulge fore and aft in this unsightly manner,” said Ralph Owen Brewster.

Then he added, “Our womenfolks bulge in only the most delightful ways.”

The $1,000 fund, raised by New York architect Charles Ewing, would pay for the new mural if the government would OK the removal of the first.

Tarkington added more fuel to the fire. He insisted the figures in the picture had no clothes on. “It includes several figures both male and female. The central figure is a bumpy looking male with an old automobile tire around his waist as a life preserver. The ladies are all bumpy, too, and very ugly. The beach in the picture looks like Coney Island. Why should Kennebunkport have to have a Coney Island mural in its post office? It isn’t a summer resort. There isn’t even a beach. The beach is across the river at Kennebunk.”

There were actually no nudes in the mural, which underscores one of the odder aspects of Tarkington taking on the role of art critic. He was, by this point in his life, blind.

Still others said the people in the mural looked to be inspired by images of Russian peasants. They hinted at potential Communist sympathies on the part of the artist.

Squealing Dowagers

The artist was Elizabeth Tracy Montminy, known as Tracy Montminy. The Boston woman had recently graduated from Radcliffe when she painted the mural in 1941. It was the fifth and final mural she would paint for the WPA. She had painted four others in Saugus, Milton and Medford, Mass, and Downers Grove, Ill.

Tracy Montminy

But only “Bathers” in Maine attracted any controversy. Montminy defended her work. She described the mural as showing “a Renaissance influence in which the arabesque predominates.”

She chalked up the controversy to “the squealing of some cachectic dowagers.”

Nevertheless, President Harry Truman in May of 1945 signed the budget bill allowing for the removal of the mural. “Eviction Order for those Fatties of Kennebunkport Post Office Wall Signed,” announced one headline. Within a month, the post office had the mural removed.

The second Kennebunkport mural.

The mural that now graces the Kennebunkport post office shows Kennebunkport Harbor in the 1830s. An artist named George Grant painted it.

The mural’s whereabouts today is unknown. It ended up somewhere in Washington, D.C. The painting of the ships that replaced still resides in Kennebunkport’s post office.

This story about the Kennebunkport mural was updated in 2021. Image of Tracy Montminy By Columbia Tribune – Original publication: ca. 1940s unknownImmediate source: http://www.columbiatribune.com/arts_life/ovation/who-were-the-montminys/article_b7200ad7-ef5a-5018-be18-9eabc243c6f0.html, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51160512. Second Kennebunkport mural and Kennebunkport Post Office by Jimmy Emerson DVM via Flickr, CC by 2.0.

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Al Marder, The Oldest Living Communist Victim of the Red Scare

Al Marder in 2021 attended a ceremony celebrating the return of the Amistad replica to New Haven Harbor. At 99 years old, he had played a big part in bringing the Amistad story to the public’s attention.

He had still served as president of the Amistad Committee at the age of 94. He chaired of Connecticut’s Freedom Trail. And he was one of the last surviving Communists persecuted during the Red Scare of the Cold War Era.

Al Marder at James Hillhouse High School

Al Marder

Marder grew up in New Haven during the Great Depression, the son of Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine. They ran a small grocery store in a poor neighborhood of African-Americans, Germans, Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, Italians, Lithuanians and Irish railroad workers.

“As a boy it became very evident to me how people were living and scraping along,“ he recalled in a 2016 interview with The New England Historical Society. “The store was near the railroad yards, and I saw men getting off the cars, looking for work or something to eat. If it snowed, everyone went down to City Hall to get a job shoveling snow…There was the sheriff sitting in the store collecting receipts because my parents couldn’t pay the bills.”

During the desperate years of the Great Depression, many Americans questioned capitalism and turned toward communism as a solution to the country’s despair. Within a decade, America’s communist allies became enemies. Led by Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy innocent people were accused of espionage, imprisoned, thrown out of work.

Al Marder was a victim of the anti-communist hysteria. So was another Connecticut resident, Arthur Miller, who compared it to the Salem witch trials in his play The Crucible.

Marder was indicted in 1954 for plotting to overthrow the U.S. government. His lawyer, Catherine Roraback, later became famous for arguing the Griswold v. Connecticut trial, which legalized birth control in Connecticut and paved the way for recognition of the right to privacy.

Al Marder, Activist

At James Hillhouse High School, Al Marder got interested in the political ferment that was all around him. Some of his fellow students were Socialists like their parents. Young women wore leather jackets and berets to show their support for the Loyalists during the Spanish Civil War.

Al Marder, still active after all these years.

Marder organized a peace council at Hillhouse to discuss politics, and before school he sneaked out of the house to distribute handbills for the New Haven labor movement. The garment workers didn’t really need him, he said, but he leafleted the workers at Sargent’s and New Haven Clock before the 7 a.m. shift.

By 1954 he had graduated from the University of Connecticut, served in Europe during World War II, married, had several small children and become a journeyman printer. He also faced prison, charged with advocating the violent overthrow of the U.S. government.

Marder had never abandoned his activism. As a young man he had campaigned successfully for the state to make college accessible to working-class students by offering night school, now Southern Connecticut State University. He organized a scholarship campaign for African-American students at UConn and the first integrated amateur drama club in Connecticut called the Unity Players. He went to meetings of the Wobblies, and told the Shoeleather History Project he met Elizabeth Gurley Flynn several times.

Al Marder also belonged to the Communist Party.

The Trial

The Communist Party of Connecticut didn’t survive the Red Scare. Al Marder got his union card and went to work for Donnelly Bros. in Bristol. He heard that all Connecticut Communists were to be arrested, so he took off for New York and assumed the name Ken Green. That job didn’t last, but he got another one in Stamford. One day he was walking to lunch and heard a woman shouting, “Spies, there are spies here!” She had belonged to the Young Communist League with them as a student. The police picked them up but had no grounds for arrest and released them.

The 1940 Smith Act, however, had made it a crime to advocate the overthrow of the U.S. government. Al Marder was finally arrested and charged under the Smith Act, along with six other New Haven Communists. Police swept them up with 125 other Communists in 11 U.S. cities, including Boston.

Al Marder, 2016

Marder’s task was to find a lawyer. He sent 100 mimeographed letters to lawyers throughout the state and one agreed to take his case. Catherine Roraback was fresh out of Yale Law School. Her uncle, J. Henry Roraback, had controlled the Republican Party in Connecticut.

She was bright, committed and took full advantage of her name, recalled Marder. “Volunteering to be a lawyer for a Communist when the entire country was embroiled in anticommunism — it took courage.”

The trial lasted seven months and made headline news. Marder was acquitted and the cases of the others were thrown out due to insufficient evidence. “They were just ordinary people looking for a better society,” he said. The judge and jury knew they were expected to convict them – but didn’t.

Aftermath

Before the trial began, Marder had gotten a job as a printer in New York City under his assumed name. The night he was acquitted, he got a phone call at home from his old boss who said, “Al, if you need a job come back.”

“He called me in, said ‘I knew who you were from the morning you walked into the place’,” Marder recalled. The FBI had said to fire him. His boss said he couldn’t because he had a union contract, and the only way he could fire him was if he was incompetent during the 90-day probation or if he did something in the shop.

Marder for years worked on the Amistad Committee, bringing to light the story of the slave revolt and the court decision that upheld freedom for the captured Africans. Picture here: the Freedom Schooner Amistad.

Marder wound up working in the horticulture industry, representing growers – and spending the rest of his life working for peace and justice.

In 1957, the U.S. Supreme Court severely restricted the Smith Act, ruling it violated the U.S. Constitution.

Mary Donohue profiled Marder in her article, “A Life of Conviction” in the Spring 2016 edition of “Connecticut Explored,” the magazine of Connecticut history. To find out how to subscribe, click here.

This story last updated in 2022.

Images: Freedom Schooner Amistad By Rhvanwinkle, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=36402773

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Karl Muck Departs the Boston Symphony Orchestra in World War I Era Scandal

Henry Lee Higginson founded the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1881, and for nearly 40 years made it an unparalleled success. Until, that is, the last year of his life when musical director Karl Muck became enveloped in a scandal that turned the symphony into a political flashpoint during World War I.

Karl Muck

When America entered World War I in April of 1917, Higginson had reason to worry about his conductor. Muck, then 57, was born in Germany and had connections in government circles. Still, he was a musician, not a military man.

Karl Muck

Higginson had been somewhat bold to engage Muck in the first place. He had conducted the orchestra from 1906 to 1908 as a guest, and Higginson brought him back in 1912 more permanently. The press praised the decision. The BSO had traditionally used unknowns in the role of conductor, rather than more famous, established conductors like Muck.

Higginson talked about the issues surrounding the war with Muck, and he agreed to stay apolitical. And for a time, it worked. The BSO continued its performances, and Muck kept quiet.

By 1917, orchestras were starting to add The Star Spangled Banner to their concert lineups and the BSO was slow to adopt the custom. After a November concert in Providence, Muck was accused of refusing to play the national anthem. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, correct. Muck didn’t like anyone telling him what he had to perform. Still, he had not refused. A request to perform the song did not reach him. Higginson had simply ignored it.

Carnegie Hall

The issue simmered and rose up again as the end of 1917 approached. Muck and the BSO were scheduled to play three nights at New York’s Carnegie Hall the following year. The socialites of New York, led by Mrs. William Jay, began agitating against his performance, as well as German opera performances.

Boston Symphony Orchestra

Their fight broke into the press. Higginson tried to calm the waters by spreading the story that Muck was Swiss. While he was born in Germany, his father had obtained a Swiss passport for him as a youngster and Higginson tried to pass the conductor off as a neutral party.

By the end of December, however, the controversy was growing. The City of Pittsburgh banned Muck from performing. Leaders in Springfield, Mass., said they would not rent space for a BSO concert.

And in New York, Mrs. Jay continued her protests and letter-writing. She did not want Muck performing at Carnegie Hall.

The press reported, “Her letters were without effect on Major Higginson, except to move him to inform Mrs. Jay that her letters were a distinct annoyance.”

Officials in Washington, D.C. forced cancellation of a BSO concert there. They declared Muck, along with 22 other members of the orchestra, was an enemy alien and not allowed to enter the city.

On March 14, 1918, Muck strode to the podium at Carnegie Hall. The press reported he received a 1-minute and 42-second standing ovation. When the crowd quieted, he struck up a rendition of The Star Spangled Banner that received another ovation.

Arrest

The public controversy over Muck died, temporarily. Behind the scenes, however, pressure to remove Muck was growing. Higginson privately laid out his intentions. At the close of the season in May, he would announce Muck’s departure and he, himself, would also resign. He never got the chance to put his plans into action.

On March 25, police arrested Muck as a hostile alien. He resigned from the symphony at the end of March. Then at the start of April he was sent to a Georgia internment camp, with 4,000 others of German descent.

Muck and several others had to be taken to the camp under guard amid threats from people who said they would take him from the train and hang him. For his part, Muck said he was pleased with the change. He couldn’t smoke cigarettes at the Cambridge, Mass., jail, something he could do in the internment camp.

Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had promised to rein in the practices of the Justice Department, but it was no aid to Muck. The Justice Department wanted to question him about his friendship with Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm and his knowledge of the Kaiser’s plans for America.

As April progressed, Swiss officials dropped their defense of Muck. They no longer claimed he was a Swiss citizen. Higginson resigned from the orchestra, handing it over to a board of directors.

Arrest of Karl Muck (center)

Deportee

Since his first day at the camp, Muck and others were offered the option of being sent to Germany if they wished. At the urging of his wife, Muck finally agreed to deportation, and in August of 1919 he was boarded a ship to Europe.

He gave interviews in which he was bitter about his treatment. America was under mob rule, he said, though he said his life in the internment camp was largely comfortable. He noted that the BSO had 29 musicians in the internment camp, and he doubted the symphony could recover.

Back in Germany, he told reporters that his internment resulted from police and FBI looking at his shorthand notations for the music to Bach’s The Passion of St. Matthew. They mistook it, he said, for some sort of spy code. He would conduct the Berlin Philharmonic that fall.

Henry Higginson

In November 1919, just four days after the official end of World War I, Henry Higginson died at age 85 from complications of surgery earlier in the year. Boston mourned the successful banker and Civil War soldier. No one had questioned his loyalty during the Muck affair, or his decision to stand by Muck, though some thought it curious.

The public was about to hear the final piece of the story.

The Real Story

In December, the newspapers in Boston and New York published a “Now it can be told” account of Karl Muck’s internment and deportation. “Love and Intrigue Mingle in the Story of Karl Muck Deported Orchestra Leader,” read the headlines on a series of articles that began just before Christmas.

This account of the story revealed that when police investigated Muck they learned of his affair with Rosamond Young, a 20-year-old opera singer from a wealthy Boston-area family. He had met her years before when she visited Germany.

Police pressured him with a threat of a morals charge into accepting internment. Higginson had also realized the scandal would end any possibility of salvaging Muck’s job.

Following his arrest, Muck had asked the girl to burn his letters to her, but she did not, and police discovered them. The newspapers published excerpts revealing an odd mix of incriminating details that showed Muck to be both infatuated with the girl and still very much in love with Germany.

“Dream of me darling. Dream of the throbbing moments we spent together, and dream of the hours we will yet spend,” he wrote in one letter.

In another, he promised he would take the girl with him to Germany and marry her.

“It will be only a very short time when our gracious Kaiser will act upon my request and recall me to Berlin,” he wrote. Once there,”our Kaiser will be prevailed upon to see the benefit to the Fatherland in my obtaining a divorce and making you my own.”

Valuable Servant

Muck explained that he wanted to return to Germany sooner, but had agreed to stay in the United States at the request of Germany’s ambassador to America:

“He insisted I am the fatherland’s most valuable servant in this country. In the name of our gracious Kaiser he begged me to remain here.”

No evidence emerged that Muck provided any material aid to the Germans. The closest thing to an actual allegation against him was his loyalty to Germany and, in the event of an invasion, he belonged to a group of German Americans who would help the enemy.

Muck would have many more successful years as a conductor in Germany before he died in 1940.

Images: Boston Symphony Hall By mooogmonster – CIMG2733, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=955273. With thanks to Melissa D. Burrage, The Karl Muck Scandal; Classical Music and Xenophobia in World War I.

This story was updated in 2022.

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