Ww2 soviet spy network8/31/2023 ![]() ![]() In 1922, he was the machine Democrat who knocked off the celebrated Meyer London, who had the honor of being the only House member to vote against the wartime Sedition Act of 1918, which abridged the First Amendment by making it a crime to “utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language” about the U.S. In 1911, he began his ascent in the Tammany Hall organization-first as a special deputy attorney general, then city alderman and, for three years, as a state assemblyman in Albany. He would claim that over the course of his career he represented 30,000 slum dwellers free of charge. Her greatest pleasure was to hear her son sing, dreadfully out of tune, ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee.’ ”Īfter attending City College and graduating from New York Law School, Dickstein was admitted to the bar and started a private practice specializing in landlord-tenant disputes. “Before he had completely lost his accent, Sam was sent to school where Bessie knew he would learn the fundamentals of Americanism. ![]() Slata (known as Bessie) “took care that Sam, even at his early age, should escape the evil influence that was spreading like a net over the community,” the author writes. According to a hack biography written about him in 1935, titled American Defender, his mother Slata sought to insulate him from the pervasive leftism that would enable a Socialist, Meyer London, to be elected as the neighborhood’s congressman. Still, only within the last 18 months has an effort begun to remove Dickstein’s name from the handful of street signs that bear it-a laborious bureaucratic process led by a community organization that has pledged “to right an historic wrong.”īorn in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1885, Dickstein immigrated with his religious Jewish parents to the Lower East Side as a small child. It was quite a posthumous comedown for a man who passed himself off as a devoted servant of his poor supporters and a dedicated upholder of American ideals. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. The authors also revealed that Stalin had a spy in Congress, an exasperating character who once “blazed up very much, claiming that if we didn’t give him money he would break with us,” according to his Soviet contact. That is, until 1999, when Allen Weinstein and Alexander Vassiliev published The Haunted Wood: Soviet Espionage in America-the Stalin Era, which through the use of previously unavailable KGB records went a long way toward convincing those who could be convinced that Alger Hiss and Julius Rosenberg were in fact working for the Soviet Union. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten. In 1963, a portion of the street grid close to where he used to live on East Broadway was christened “Samuel Dickstein Plaza.” No controversy attended the occasion. So over-the-top as to be ineffectual-he had the poor taste to call for Noel Coward to be barred from the country because the English wit made a quip about the manliness of Brooklyn soldiers-Dickstein left Congress in 1946, and served as a state Supreme Court justice until his death in 1954. An unusually shameless publicity hound in a legislative body full of them, Dickstein had a habit of inviting his antagonists to step outside and settle matters like men, once announcing such a fistic challenge to Rep. If anyone can be credited (or blamed) with introducing the phrase “un-American activities” into the nation’s lexicon, it is he. At a time when Joseph McCarthy was still an unknown lawyer in Wisconsin, Dickstein invented the modern practice of naming names-broadcasting the identities of suspected subversives without the slightest pretense of due process. It was said he never left his red brick home on the Lower East Side of Manhattan without his Malacca walking stick, strolling past the teeming tenements with the air of what his Jewish immigrant constituents would call a big macher.īut Dickstein, a Democrat from New York City who served in the House of Representatives from the early 1920s to the mid-1940s, conducted himself in public life with none of the refined elegance that his self-presentation suggested. Samuel Dickstein was short and silver-haired, “a slim little man in a natty gray suit,” the New York Times once characterized him. He will be discussing his new book, Double Agent: The First Hero of World War II and How the FBI Outwitted and Destroyed a Nazi Spy Ring (Scribner), at noon on October 7, at the International Spy Museum in Washington, D.C. Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York. ![]()
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