Albert E. Kahn
Encyclopedia
Albert Eugene Kahn was an American journalist
Journalist
A journalist collects and distributes news and other information. A journalist's work is referred to as journalism.A reporter is a type of journalist who researchs, writes, and reports on information to be presented in mass media, including print media , electronic media , and digital media A...

, photographer, author
Author
An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and nephew of modernist industrial architect Albert Kahn. Albert E. Kahn's father, Moritz Kahn, was senior engineer in the firm who set up the Kahn brothers Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....

 operation in conjunction with Gosproekstroi
Gosproekstroi
Gosproekstroi was the State Project Construction Trust of the Soviet Union.This organisation was set up following an agreement between Vesenkha and Albert Kahn Inc in 1930. Moritz Kahn, one of the three Kahn brothers, said:...

. He was the American Labor Party
American Labor Party
The American Labor Party was a political party in the United States established in 1936 which was active almost exclusively in the state of New York. The organization was founded by labor leaders and former members of the Socialist Party who had established themselves as the Social Democratic...

 candidate in the 1948 elections for New York's 25th congressional district
New York's 25th congressional district
The 25th Congressional District of New York is a congressional district for the United States House of Representatives that stretches from Syracuse to the northeastern suburbs of Rochester. The district comprises all of Onondaga and Wayne counties, the northernmost portion of Cayuga County and the...

.

Early life and education

Kahn was born in London, England to an affluent politically conservative Jewish family. Educated in the United States, he attended Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy
Phillips Exeter Academy is a private secondary school located in Exeter, New Hampshire, in the United States.Exeter is noted for its application of Harkness education, a system based on a conference format of teacher and student interaction, similar to the Socratic method of learning through asking...

 and Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College
Dartmouth College is a private, Ivy League university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. The institution comprises a liberal arts college, Dartmouth Medical School, Thayer School of Engineering, and the Tuck School of Business, as well as 19 graduate programs in the arts and sciences...

, where he was a star athlete. His education exposed him to Shakespeare, and later in life he said that it was the study of King Lear
King Lear
King Lear is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The title character descends into madness after foolishly disposing of his estate between two of his three daughters based on their flattery, bringing tragic consequences for all. The play is based on the legend of Leir of Britain, a mythological...

that first awakened in him a sense of injustice. He was Dartmouth Class Poet, graduating in 1932. Married in 1934, he and the former Harriet Warner moved to California, where Kahn tried unsuccessfully to become a Hollywood screenwriter.

Political leanings

After the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War
Spanish Civil War
The Spanish Civil WarAlso known as The Crusade among Nationalists, the Fourth Carlist War among Carlists, and The Rebellion or Uprising among Republicans. was a major conflict fought in Spain from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939...

, Kahn agreed to lead an ambulance tour to raise medical relief funds for Loyalist forces fighting against the fascist-supported Franco
Francisco Franco
Francisco Franco y Bahamonde was a Spanish general, dictator and head of state of Spain from October 1936 , and de facto regent of the nominally restored Kingdom of Spain from 1947 until his death in November, 1975...

 rebellion. On the tour, Kahn spoke to audiences ranging from the wealthy to the unemployed. It was the height of the Depression
Great Depression
The Great Depression was a severe worldwide economic depression in the decade preceding World War II. The timing of the Great Depression varied across nations, but in most countries it started in about 1929 and lasted until the late 1930s or early 1940s...

 and Kahn was deeply affected by the widespread deprivation that he saw. Communists and socialists organized many of the speaking events and impressed Kahn with their idealism. After completing the tour in 1938, he joined the Communist Party of the United States.

With no employment prospects, Kahn accepted a job at Albert Kahn, Inc., but his political activism quickly caused a rupture. A talented orator, he began giving anti-fascist speeches. As he shared his name with his prominent uncle, the publicity caused consternation at the firm. Their concern was heightened by the reality that Henry Ford
Henry Ford
Henry Ford was an American industrialist, the founder of the Ford Motor Company, and sponsor of the development of the assembly line technique of mass production. His introduction of the Model T automobile revolutionized transportation and American industry...

 was the company's largest client, and Ford was engaged in business in Nazi Germany. In a meeting with his uncle and father, the younger Kahn was given a choice: Stop speaking publicly, or resign. He chose the later option.

Anti-Nazi journalism

Almost immediately Kahn was offered a position as Executive Director of the newly-formed American Council Against Nazi Propaganda. Working for a Board of Directors including Helen Keller
Helen Keller
Helen Adams Keller was an American author, political activist, and lecturer. She was the first deafblind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree....

, Condé Nast
Condé Nast Publications
Condé Nast, a division of Advance Publications, is a magazine publisher. In the U.S., it produces 18 consumer magazines, including Architectural Digest, Bon Appétit, GQ, The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, and Vogue, as well as four business-to-business publications, 27 websites, and more than 50 apps...

, John Gunther
John Gunther
John Gunther was an American journalist and author whose success came primarily in the 1940s and 1950s with a series of popular sociopolitical works known as the "Inside" books...

, former Ambassodor William E. Dodd, and Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual...

, Kahn founded The Hour, a syndicated newsletter. In that capacity he engaged in investigative journalism
Investigative journalism
Investigative journalism is a form of journalism in which reporters deeply investigate a single topic of interest, often involving crime, political corruption, or corporate wrongdoing. An investigative journalist may spend months or years researching and preparing a report. Investigative journalism...

 to expose Nazi espionage, sabotage and propaganda operations in the United States. He also investigated the activities of American fascist and pro-fascist groups such as the German-American Bund. The Hour's revelations were widely used in printed media, by radio commentators such as Walter Winchell, and by the War Department, Justice Department and the Office of War Information.

Books

Material obtained by The Hour became the foundation for Kahn's first best-selling book, Sabotage! The Secret War Against America (1942), co-authored with Michael Sayers. Plans by Reader's Digest to print excerpts from the book resulted in the first notations by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
J. Edgar Hoover
John Edgar Hoover was the first Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation of the United States. Appointed director of the Bureau of Investigation—predecessor to the FBI—in 1924, he was instrumental in founding the FBI in 1935, where he remained director until his death in 1972...

 in Kahn's FBI file: "Can nothing be done to stop this?"

Kahn and Sayers also collaborated on The Plot Against The Peace (1945) and The Great Conspiracy: The Secret War Against Soviet Russia (1946), an international bestseller. In the latter, on the Moscow purge trials, the authors' found credible the confessions used to convict leading Soviet communists of treason in against the Right Opposition
Right Opposition
The Right Opposition was the name given to the tendency made up of Nikolai Bukharin, Alexei Rykov, Mikhail Tomsky and their supporters within the Soviet Union in the late 1920s...

 and suspected Fifth Columnists during 1936-38.

Kahn, an outspoken opponent of the Cold War
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...

, was blacklisted from mainstream publishing in the late 1940s. Using pre-sales of books to leftist trade unions, he wrote and published High Treason: The Plot Against the People (Lear, 1950), a post-1917 political history of the United States, and The Game of Death: Effects of the Cold War on Our Children (C&K, 1953).

Cameron and Kahn

In the early 1950s, Kahn and Angus Cameron
Angus Cameron
Angus Cameron was a Republican and a member of the United States Senate from Wisconsin from 1875 to 1881, when he did not seek reelection, and again from 1881 to 1885, when he was elected to succeed Matthew H. Carpenter, who died in office; he did not seek reelection in 1885...

, an eminent Little, Brown editor who had recently been blacklisted, formed the publishing firm Cameron & Kahn. In 1955 the firm published False Witness, the confession of former Communist and paid government witness, Harvey Matusow
Harvey Matusow
Harvey Matusow was a U.S. Communist who protected himself from HUAC by providing evidence against his former left-wing colleagues. His false accusations led to his own perjury conviction and to being blacklisted...

, that he had repeatedly lied under oath. Matusow's announced confession caused a sensation, and the government's response to pending publication of the book was to subpoena Kahn, Cameron and Matusow to appear before a federal grand jury. The publishers were accused of bribing Matusow to falsely assert that he had committed perjury on behalf of the government. After months of hearings and thousands of pages of testimony, the grand jury declined to issue indictments against Cameron or Kahn.

Simultaneously with the grand jury proceedings, Kahn, Cameron and Matusow were subpoenaed to testify before the United States Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, chaired by the Mississippi senator, James Eastland
James Eastland
James Oliver Eastland was an American politician from Mississippi who briefly served in the United States Senate as a Democrat in 1941; and again from 1943 until his resignation December 27, 1978. From 1947 to 1978, he served alongside John Stennis, also a Democrat...

. The purpose of the hearings was to determine whether publication of False Witness was the result of a Communist conspiracy, rather than to assess the origin and consequences of Matusow's admitted perjury.

The story of the book's publication and its aftermath was written by Kahn in the late 1950s, but not published until 1987, eight years after his death (The Matusow Affair, Moyer Bell).

Other books published by Cameron and Kahn included The testament of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Seeds of destruction; the truth about the U.S. occupation of Germany by Cedric Belfrage
Cedric Belfrage
Cedric Henning Belfrage was a socialist, author, journalist, translator and co-founder of the radical US-weekly newspaper the National Guardian...

 and The ecstasy of Owen Muir by Ring Lardner
Ring Lardner
Ringgold Wilmer Lardner was an American sports columnist and short story writer best known for his satirical takes on the sports world, marriage, and the theatre.-Personal life:...

.

Breaking the blacklist

During the 1950s, Kahn had his passport revoked for refusing to sign the required affidavit stating whether or not he was or had ever been a member of the Communist Party, a requirement ruled unconstitutional by the United States Supreme Court in a case involving noted painter and Kahn friend, Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent
Rockwell Kent was an American painter, printmaker, illustrator, and writer.- Biography :Rockwell Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, the same year as fellow American artists George Bellows and Edward Hopper...

.

Kahn broke the blacklist in 1962 with publication by Simon & Schuster of the critically acclaimed Days With Ulanova
Galina Ulanova
Galina Sergeyevna Ulánova is frequently cited as being one of the greatest 20th Century ballerinas. Her flat in Moscow is designated a national museum, and there are monuments to her in Saint Petersburg and Stockholm....

, an intimate portrait of the fabled Bolshoi ballerina. While in Moscow
Moscow
Moscow is the capital, the most populous city, and the most populous federal subject of Russia. The city is a major political, economic, cultural, scientific, religious, financial, educational, and transportation centre of Russia and the continent...

, Kahn met with Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Khrushchev
Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev led the Soviet Union during part of the Cold War. He served as First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964, and as Chairman of the Council of Ministers, or Premier, from 1958 to 1964...

 in the Kremlin
Kremlin
A kremlin , same root as in kremen is a major fortified central complex found in historic Russian cities. This word is often used to refer to the best-known one, the Moscow Kremlin, or metonymically to the government that is based there...

 and proposed collaboration with him on the Soviet leader's autobiography
Autobiography
An autobiography is a book about the life of a person, written by that person.-Origin of the term:...

, but Khrushchev declined. Other books included Smetana and the Beetles (Random House, 1967), a satire of the defection of Stalin's daughter
Svetlana Alliluyeva
Svetlana Iosifovna Alliluyeva , later known as Lana Peters, was the youngest child and only daughter of Soviet Premier Joseph Stalin and Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin's second wife...

; Joys and Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, 1970), Pablo Casals
Pablo Casals
Pau Casals i Defilló , known during his professional career as Pablo Casals, was a Spanish Catalan cellist and conductor. He is generally regarded as the pre-eminent cellist of the first half of the 20th century, and one of the greatest cellists of all time...

' memoir as told to Kahn; and The Unholy Hymnal (Simon & Schuster, 1971), a satirical expose of the Credibility Gap
Credibility gap
Credibility gap is a political term that came into wide use during the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, it was most frequently used to describe public skepticism about the Lyndon B. Johnson administration's statements and policies on the Vietnam War...

 of the Johnson and Nixon administrations.

Personal beliefs

Albert E. Kahn was an outspoken critic of the Cold War, the McCarthy era, and the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...

. A socialist, he described himself as a "radical in the tradition of Jack London
Jack London
John Griffith "Jack" London was an American author, journalist, and social activist. He was a pioneer in the then-burgeoning world of commercial magazine fiction and was one of the first fiction writers to obtain worldwide celebrity and a large fortune from his fiction alone...

". During a period when many were intimidated by government efforts to suppress dissent, Kahn actively sought ways to communicate his views to the public at large. "As far as I was concerned, I was acting in the American tradition of Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson was the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence and the Statute of Virginia for Religious Freedom , the third President of the United States and founder of the University of Virginia...

 and Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine
Thomas "Tom" Paine was an English author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States...

 and the framers of the Constitution," Kahn said in an interview shortly before his death. "The idea of any government telling me that I owe unequivocal allegiance to it is the most repugnant thing on earth."

Allegations of Soviet spying

After his death, speculation developed as to whether Kahn had served Soviet intelligence. In 1946 the San Francisco KGB
KGB
The KGB was the commonly used acronym for the . It was the national security agency of the Soviet Union from 1954 until 1991, and was the premier internal security, intelligence, and secret police organization during that time.The State Security Agency of the Republic of Belarus currently uses the...

 suggested that Kahn be recruited into Soviet espionage. Kahn requested that Julia Older, who worked in the Office of Strategic Services
Office of Strategic Services
The Office of Strategic Services was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was a predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency...

 (OSS), obtain information. Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Bentley
Elizabeth Terrill Bentley was an American spy for the Soviet Union from 1938 until 1945. In 1945 she defected from the Communist Party and Soviet intelligence and became an informer for the U.S. She exposed two networks of spies, ultimately naming over 80 Americans who had engaged in espionage for...

 stated in her deposition to the FBI that Kahn had furnished information directly to Jacob Golos
Jacob Golos
Jacob Golos, , was a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary of ethnic Jewish heritage who became a secret police operative on behalf of the USSR in the United States...

 and herself in 1942 on immigrant Ukrainians
Ukrainians
Ukrainians are an East Slavic ethnic group native to Ukraine, which is the sixth-largest nation in Europe. The Constitution of Ukraine applies the term 'Ukrainians' to all its citizens...

 hostile to the Soviet Union. During that period, the Soviet Union was an ally of the United States in the war against Nazi Germany. Ukrainian nationalist and pro-fascist organizations were considered by the American government as allies of the Germans, and at the time Kahn shared his investigative findings with the FBI and American military intelligence. Venona project
Venona project
The VENONA project was a long-running secret collaboration of the United States and United Kingdom intelligence agencies involving cryptanalysis of messages sent by intelligence agencies of the Soviet Union, the majority during World War II...

 researchers John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr speculate Kahn may be code name "Fighter", as referenced in Venona decypt # 247 San Francisco to Moscow, 14 June 1946.

In September, 1958, Kahn was called for the final time to testify before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee. One witness, Fedor Mansvetov, testified that he knew Kahn to be a Soviet spy because "he is following party line" by not referring to East European countries as "satellites". Kahn submitted an affidavit with the committee which charged that "witnesses at your hearings have been repeatedly encouraged to bandy about...grotesque accusations", and included a challenge:

"If I could sue your committee for defamation of character and interference with my work, I would. It might be a good lesson for you. Perhaps you will advise me whether each of your committee members is willing to waive his congressional immunity and assume full personal responsibility for spreading the charges made against me by your witnesses at this hearing. Perhaps just one of you –let us say Senator Eastland –will repeat in public and without congressional immunity the accusation that I am a spy. There seems a peculiar aptness to that popular American saying, 'Put up or shut up.'"


None of the Senators accepted his offer.

Later Life

Kahn was a founding member of the World Peace Council
World Peace Council
The World Peace Council is an international organization that advocates universal disarmament, sovereignty and independence and peaceful co-existence, and campaigns against imperialism, weapons of mass destruction and all forms of discrimination...

.

In 1975 Kahn expressed interest in the People's Temple under Jim Jones
Jim Jones
James Warren "Jim" Jones was the founder and leader of the Peoples Temple, which is best known for the November 18, 1978 mass suicide of 909 Temple members in Jonestown, Guyana along with the killings of five other people at a nearby airstrip.Jones was born in Indiana and started the Temple in...

, and warned Temple members that the US Government potentially posed a dangerous threat to the organization and to Jones.

He died on September 15, 1979 of a heart attack in Glen Ellen, California
Glen Ellen, California
Glen Ellen is a census-designated place in Sonoma Valley, Sonoma County, California, USA. The population was 784 at the 2010 census, down from 992 at the 2000 census. Glen Ellen is the location of Jack London State Historic Park , Sonoma Valley Regional Park, and a former home of Hunter S....

.

Further reading

  • Albert E. Kahn, The Matusow Affair, Moyer Bell (1987).
  • Brian Kahn, My Father's Son, manuscript (2007).
  • Elizabeth Bentley deposition 30 November 1945, FBI file 65-14603. Also see Venona 247 KGB San Francisco to Moscow, 14 June 1946, for an ambiguous mention of Kahn in the clear.
  • John Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr, Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America, Yale University Press (1999).
  • Mary Arbunich, "Touching Image of Inspiration that Stirred Eichler's Soul -- Two Boys, Two Races, One Poignant Photograph", Eichler Network
  • Michael Sayers, Albert E. Kahn. Sabotage! The Secret War against America. Harper & Brothers Publishers. 1942

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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