Matilda Landsman was a New York Times employee in the 1950s. She was subpoenaed by the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in November 1955 during their investigation into Communists in the media. She was one of 34 news media employees to be subpoenaed by the Senate after the testimony of journalist Winston Burdett

Winston Burdett

Winston Burdett was an American broadcast journalist and correspondent for the CBS Radio Network during World War II and later for CBS television news. He was born in Buffalo, New York. From 1937-1942 he was involved with the Communist Party...

, a one-time spy for the Soviet Union, in June 1955. Landsman worked as a Linotype

Linotype machine

The Linotype typesetting machine is a "line casting" machine used in printing. The name of the machine comes from the fact that it produces an entire line of metal type at once, hence a line-o'-type, a significant improvement over manual typesetting....

 operator at the time of her testimony in January 1956. According to allegations from unnamed sources Landsman had voluntarily obtained reassignment from the Times newsroom to the Linotype department, at lower pay, in order to do organizing and recruiting for the Communist Party

Communist Party USA

The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....

 among members of the powerful and militant typographers union

International Typographical Union

The International Typographical Union was a labor union founded on May 3, 1852 in the United States as the National Typographical Union. In its 1869 convention in Albany, New York, the union—having organized members in Canada—changed its name to the International Typographical Union...

, which was to shut down all the newspapers in New York City in a crippling 114 day strike in 1962-1963 which left half the daily papers in New York dead or mortally wounded. In the past she had worked as a stenographer in the Times news and Sunday departments, and as a secretary to Joseph Fels Barnes

Joseph Fels Barnes

Joseph Fels Barnes was a newspaperman who joined the New York Herald-Tribune in 1934, serving first as Moscow correspondent, then in Berlin, and from 1939 to 1948 as foreign editor...

, editor of the defunct New York Star, the brief-lived successor to the progressive/left daily newspaper PM

PM (newspaper)

PM was a leftist New York City daily newspaper published by Ralph Ingersoll from June 1940 to June 1948 and bankrolled by the eccentric Chicago millionaire Marshall Field III....

.

In her testimony she invoked the Fifth Amendment to avoid answering questions about her affiliation with the Communist Party.