The Canwell Files: Murder, Arson and Intrigue in the Evergreen State

By M. Kienholz

Court-certified expert on Soviet Communism and controversial figure in the Pacific Northwest, Albert Canwell, born in Spokane, Washington, followed his father (one-time Pinkerton detective), with his brother Carl (Spokane Public Safety Commissioner) and nephew David (CIA), into law enforcement. He married the daughter of a prominent Harvard-educated surgeon and raised six children at Montvale Farms on the Little Spokane River. Elected Washington State representative, Canwell was aptly chosen to investigate the notorious Democratic Capitol Club, and served as appointed chairman of the states un-American activities committee. After unsuccessful campaigns for Congress, Canwell established the American Intelligence Service providing material from his personal files to private parties, businesses, and government agencies (FDA, FBI, INS). His life, effective activism, and network (security experts J.B. Matthews, Louis Budenz, and Whittaker Chambers; legislators, and U.S. presidents) were a lightning rod for approbation and condemnation by friends and enemies. Repeated smear campaigns, professional agitation, and uninformed pseudohistorians, left a wake of disinformation and historical inaccuracies about his career and data contained in his files. As political historian and biographer, Kienholz shares the contents of his files and corrects a web of distortions and propaganda promoted by adherents to Soviet Communism.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Sep 21, 2012
• ISBN: 9781475948813

M. Kienholz

M. KIENHOLZ, researcher, poet, and author of eight books, graduated magna cum laude/Business Administration from Eastern Washington University. A professional secretary and career police stenographer, Kienholz worked with The Honorable Albert F. Canwell from the 1960s to 2002, managing his confidential files and associated library, bookstore, and print shop.

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Copyright © 2012 Mary L. Kienholz

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Contents

Preface

1.   Impetus

In the beginning …

Idaho’s murdered patriot (1905)

Finlandia and the Red Terror

Nineteen thirty-nine

Laura’s theme (1940)

2.   Home and Away

The Canwell-Espelund connection (1907)

Mountain boy

City kid (1915)

Wanderjahrs (1920s)

Ashley Holden

Confrontations (1930s)

Home again (c. 1938)

A wife for all seasons (July 3, 1941, to December 31, 1996)

Fritz Jewett

Aubrey White

The law man

3.   The Investigator

Olympia (1946–48)

Organizing the Canwell Committee

Mr. Chairman

Staff

Fleas

Freedom train of witnesses: Louis Budenz

Dr. J.B. Matthews

Joseph Kornfeder

It isn’t true unless it’s left

Black is beautiful unless it’s right

The Rader record

Challenging the capital lockdown

Laura’s theme revisited

Alfred Kohlberg: the pilot (1887-1960)

Ben Kizer, the ACLU, and the Institute of Pacific Relations

Raymond Bernard Allen (1902–86)

Total war

The Canwell files

4.   Foreign Ideologies

The candidate v. foreign ideologies

The candidate v. Don Miller

The candidate: U.S. Senate campaign (1950)

Candidate for U.S. Congress

Bankruptcy (1961)

5.   Counter-Subversion: Agencies and Legislation

The Big Picture

The Smith Act of 1940

The Mundt Bill of 1948 and Internal Security Act of 1950

6.   The Unfriendly

The who and the they

Stanley Soderland and associates

John Caughlan

Jerry J. O’Connell

Vernon (Vern, Verne) Countryman

John S. Daschbach

Ernest Boyd MacNaughton

Sharon Boswell and Lorraine McConaghy

Ray Moore

Florence Bean James

Jane Sanders

Mark Jenkins

Marjan Petty

Ross Anderson

Sarah Nash Gates

Steven K. Eugster

Cedric Belfrage (1904-1990)

Sally Belfrage

David H. Price

And a post script about Jim Camden

And a post-post-scriptum about Ted S. McGregor, Jr.

7.   The Friendly

Links in high and low places (from 1947)

Dr. J.B. Matthews and the Methodists

Ben Mandel

Fred and Hazel Neindorff

Harper Knowles

Ralph de Toledano

Stan Leith

Styles Bridges

Scott McLeod

Jack Tenney

Don Tait and Floyd Paxton

Spokane friends

8.   Foreign Service Officer

Intergovernmental Committee for European Migration (ICEM) (1954)

9.   Let’s Shoot the Sheriff

Subpoenaing the Chairman (1955)

10.   Evolvement

Reorganizing

Entrepreneur (1959–61)

Town Meeting (1962)

Meltdown

Freedom Library and Bookstore

An open idea mart

The Anti-Communism Freedom Fighters, Inc. (1961–62)

The Goldwater campaign (1964)

American Intelligence Service

11.   Struggles

Learning about debt (1961 to infinity)

Profit and loss

12.   Free Speech

Okanogan—prelude to legal terrorism (1962)

Sally

Vic and Charley

Sally’s crowd at Accokeek

Arthurdale, West Virginia, and Greenbelt, Maryland

The community at Accokeek

John‘s experience

John’s heritage: the Frankist Kabbalists

Seeds of revolution

Josef Goldmark’s crowd

13.   Legal Terrorism and Plaintiffs’ Witnesses

The American Civil Liberties Union and radical representation

Okanogan revisited: a suit to squelch free speech

The lawyers

In the course of events

Harry Cain

Paul Jacobs

William F. Tommy Tompkins

Sterling Hayden

Samuel Fancher

Father Francis Frank Conklin, S.J.

Slade Gorton

Hannah Hanan

Sally and John Goldmark

14.   Response to Legal Terrorism and Defendants’ Witnesses

Herb Philbrick

Karl Prussion

Ford Q. Elvidge (1892–1980)

Barbara Hartle

John Lautner

Donald Jackson

Margaret Hurley and Washington legislators

Father Emmett Buckley, S.J.

Motions and Notions Notwithstanding the Verdict

15.   Afterward: Rewards and Retributions

A search for equal rights (1966)

Bill Dwyer’s crowd

The University of Washington, William P. Gerberding and Richard Larsen

The Wing Luke tragedy (1965)

16.   The John Birch Society

Where have all the fine books gone?

Where have all Al’s hearings gone?

Where has all the money gone?

Bye, bye, bookstore

Memorial cooperatives

The John Birch Society, co-ops and the ACLU

Sweepings: taking us down

17.   Vengeance

Students for a Democratic Society and MIT

Larry (1971)

18.   The Joy of Ownership

From tenant to landlord

Crash (1976)

Tenants and inspectors

Debbie Copenhaver and the Crosby statue

19.   Burn, Baby, Burn

Apprehension (1983)

Ghost Riders and ABATE

Fire

Toward a theory of the arson fire

Disappearing transcripts

20.   More Victims

Primary murder victims (1985)

The secondary victims: a propaganda blitzkrieg (1985 ad infinitum)

Oral history (1990–97)

Goodbye to a gentleman warrior

Epilogue

Dialectics of compassion: Doug Dawson (2006)

The Phoenix Rises: Peter Goldmark

Appendix

Professor Melvin Rader

American Civil Liberties Union National Officers

Bibliography

Reference Works

Abbreviations

About the author

For men and women of good will everywhere and especially to my daughter Ann who helped edit and critique my work.

Time’s glory is to calm contending kings,

To unmask falsehood and bring truth to light.

—William Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece

All truth passes through three stages.

First, it is ridiculed.

Second, it is violently opposed.

Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.

—Arthur Schopenhauer

During times of universal deceit,

Telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.

—George Orwell

Preface

This book is the story of a man who spent his life concerned about the future of America at a time when nations throughout the world were falling to Soviet Communism and its offspring. It focuses on his confidential files, a subject that has interested people for a variety of reasons. Many of his files were collected as investigative documents provided to the Washington State Joint Legislative Fact-Finding Committee on Un-American Activities (the Canwell Committee), a seven-member panel of which he was chairman. Others were added to his collection during and after the Canwell Committee hearings. All were and still are the subject of contention and vitriolic attacks by individuals dedicated to concealing reproachable and subversive aspects of their activities. Surely Albert Canwell must have sometimes thought, in the words of poet Alexander Pope, Yes, I am proud; I must be proud to see/Men not afraid of God, afraid of me!

The book is intended to enlighten, inform, and entertain, but also—if I may philosophize—to demonstrate the infallibility of one law that is difficult to break: the Law of the Continuity of Evil, whose adherents are attracted by the lure of potential advantage. Sadly, evil begets evil. The Canwell Files is not a dogmatic doomsday tome, for there is also the Law of the Continuity of Good, which maintains through the sacrifice and selflessness of concerned people. Such is demonstrated by this century-long history.

The adverse events described can be traced to the desire of humankind for power and privilege, a desire that dates from prehistory. Although this book is about a modern state—Washington—some events can be linked more directly to historic cults and ideologies of earlier centuries and even to sects and dogmas about which the reader may presently know nothing. Many revelations may surprise you.

Citizens of Washington State will recognize several of the stories in these narratives; they will not have known the particular Continuity of Evil that bound the events together in an essentially unbroken chain.

Facts are given as accurately as possible; I have reviewed the life of Representative Canwell both before and after my forty-two year involvement in his activities. Dates and names will help to illustrate the tie of one event to another. There are many pieces of the corpus missing for lack of any inquiry or effective investigation by authorities. But the connective tissue in the body of this book is Canwell’s anti-Communism mission and others’ efforts to defeat that mission. His contribution was recognized by the public when Albert F. Canwell, An Oral History became the most popular oral history ever published by the State of Washington archives. Canwell’s narrative is an important fragment of Cold War history. This book records that narrative from a completely different perspective than his oral history and extends that history to 2002.

As one involved in and victimized by these events, it has taken years of healing for me to regain the emotional drive to record them in book form. My hope is that this record will help to counterbalance the lies that have flown like bats out of the mouths of those who wish to conceal the truth, or who have been misguided about the significance of threats to our inherent freedom and liberty. These untruths have been spread in Washington State and propagated throughout the nation. Perhaps this book will help to counter the Continuity of Evil with a demonstration of the Continuity of Good and will be a primer illustrating the hazards that are met by those civilian soldiers who struggle in the cause of freedom.

CHAPTER ONE

Impetus

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In the beginning …

The career of Albert Franklyn Canwell, who was elected chairman of the Washington State Joint Legislative Fact-finding Committee on Un-American Activities under House Concurrent Resolution No. 10, State of Washington (February 26, 1947), was determined before he was conceived.

An old wives’ tale alleges that trauma suffered by a woman during pregnancy will inflict its mark on an unborn child. But the appalling experience that left its stigmata on Al was not an Old Wives’ Tale but a young wife’s tale, and it occurred one year and twelve days before he was born. It was the retelling of this tale by his mother that initially was to invoke in him a perception of outrage, then duty and responsibility (or response ability). Though planted in his boyhood, this response persisted until his death in 2002 at the age of ninety-five years.

My choice of the word stigmata is intentional, for his mission, as he occasionally called it, left him stigmatized by advocates of a totalitarian state and caused him to be subjected to contrived plots and a spray of venom that continued unabated even after his burial and occasionally brought his comment, I’m sick of this damned ‘missionary’ work.

Conversely, though he occasionally went to his siblings’ Seventh-Day Adventist church or his wife’s Roman Catholic Church, he compared himself to a jack Mormon. Al’s stigmata was the mark of someone bound as strongly to his struggle against totalitarianism as medieval believers were bound to their faith; that is, he was as strongly committed as those who claimed to exhibit nail holes in the palms of their hands as proof of their devotion to Christ. Al’s brother John once said to me, His anti-Communism means more to him than love, money, or sex. Yet it was more a dedication of his than an obsession. And I remembered the plaint of journalist and former Communist spy Whittaker Chambers that, … fighting Communism … is of all the activities I know, the most sterilely wasteful of mind and spirit. But this fight happens to be a necessity of the twentieth century. [Chambers, 64]

To some extent, fighting Communism can be sterilely wasteful of mind and spirit and even mind-numbing—as one finds the depth of Communist criminality and how little Americans know about self-protection. Al expanded his knowledge throughout his life, thought like a detective (his family sometimes called him Dick Tracy, after Chester Gould’s comic strip investigator) and maintained a spirit of rational analysis that was underappreciated by many. On the other hand—forsaking Chambers’ eloquent phrases—our fight against Communism (for I joined his fight in 1961) has seemed to me more like chickens scratching in horse manure.

The initial event that commanded Al’s destiny was manifested in a symbolism that haunted him like wraiths of the bloodied victims of Communist ideology. That event was the horrifying assassination of the former Democratic governor of Idaho, Frank S. Steunenberg.

Frank’s wife was a friend and co-religionist of Al’s mother, Christina Espelund Canwell. Both Christina and Belle Keppel Steunenberg were Seventh-Day Adventists, a shared bond. Mrs. Steunenberg was made a widow by the crime. Still, Belle witnessed to her husband’s assassin in prison and believed she had converted him to the Seventh-day Adventist faith! The assassin’s advocates, however, depicted Mrs. Steunenberg hatefully and absurdly as a religious fanatic.

The outrage against the retired governor occurred in Idaho on the evening of December 30, 1905. Al’s mother, the twenty-nine-year-old young wife of this narrative, would recall the emotions of the assassination throughout her ninety-one years. It was this shocking story retold many times that left its imprint on her son. He reacted to the story not only because of its brutality, but also because it deepened his mother’s sorrows. And a half-century after the shocking murder, he gave me a copy of the yellowed newspaper that told the assassination story.

Idaho’s murdered patriot (1905)

Frank Steunenberg, former governor of Idaho, was arriving home five days after Christmas, 1905. Upon opening the front gate of his home in Caldwell, Idaho, a fish line linked to the gate triggered a bomb that exploded, hurling him several feet and leaving him badly mangled, his eardrums ruptured. He died shortly afterward. His funeral was attended by hundreds of mourners, including many prominent political figures: Idaho’s governor, two former governors, justices of Idaho’s State Supreme Court, and numerous judges. One of Spokane’s newspapers, The Spokesman-Review, carried a front-page headline, Idaho Mourns at Bier of her Murdered Patriot.

The use of bombs as a political weapon was made fashionable among leftwing radicals within two years after the murder by the bank robbers, Meyer Moisevitch Wallach (who went by aliases Maxim Litvinoff, Buckman, and Finklestein), and Iosef Vissarionovich Dzhugashvili (more commonly called Josef Stalin, man of steel). Among other crimes, this pair of bandits found it useful to explode a bomb on a children’s playground as a distraction, while they robbed a bank at Tiflis, Russia, to obtain money for their revolution. At an early age, Canwell correctly concluded that the Communist conspiracy was a criminal conspiracy, cleverly disguised as the workers’ friend.

The Caldwell, Idaho, crime against the former governor was attributed to Albert Edward Horsley aka Harry Orchard, also known by his party name of Thomas Hogan. Orchard had been seen in Caldwell in September, stalking his prey—his transportation and lodging presumably financed by the Western Federation of Miners (WFM). The WFM resented Governor Steunenberg’s handling, while in office back in 1899, of a brutal union dispute accompanied by unnecessary violence instigated by the WFM.

When interrogated about the crime for which he was convicted, Orchard confessed to being an assassin for the WFM and stated that he was working for William D. Big Bill Haywood, Charles H. Moyer, and George A. Pettibone, officials of that union. He stated that in that role he had murdered seventeen people.

As a consequence of his confessions, WFM officials were brought to trial as co-conspirators. The attempt to prosecute them was led by William Edgar Borah of Boise, Idaho.

The WFM defense was successfully argued by Clarence Darrow, who once was tried for subornation (instigating perjury). Darrow was described by The Humanist as an Ethical Culturist (presumably a student of the Society for Ethical Culture founded by Felix Adler, an uncle of Washington State Representative Jonathan Edward Goldmark). Darrow wrote opinion pieces on agnosticism and free thought. During court proceedings, he skillfully diverted attention from Orchard’s admissions regarding WFM-ordered murders and the fact that Orchard was a former bodyguard for WFM President Charles Moyer. Darrow focused on the allegation that Pinkerton Detective Agency investigator, James McParland, obtained a statement of WFM involvement allegedly by enticements and threats. The defense also charged that McParland used unethical tactics to grab the defendants. Such charges did not impeach Orchard’s confessions or exculpate the defendants, but did influence the jury. Darrow won the case. The litigation was given wide publicity, particularly by radicals in the press, and was used to build the Darrow myth of brilliance, invincibility, and unimpeachable rationality.

Bill Haywood, one of the WFM officials who escaped a sentence in the Steunenberg murder, was again arrested on other charges in 1917, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison. He was charged with attempts to sabotage the American war effort. In 1921 he fled to the new Soviet Union where, with the help of pre-Hitlerian German troops, Bolsheviks had overthrown the czar in the October Revolution of 1917. Two years after that revolution, New York was so saturated with Communists that the state constituted the Lusk Committee (the Joint Legislative Committee of the State of New York Investigating Seditious Activities) under state Senator Clayton R. Lusk. Volume I of its report was issued in 1920. The raids under U.S. Attorney General Mitchell Palmer began that year.

Haywood became an adviser to Lenin’s government and died in Soviet Russia in 1928, allegedly a virtual outcast. His ashes were divided—a portion retained in the Soviet Kremlin and the other portion buried at German Waldheim Cemetery in Chicago near the site of the Haymarket Square riot memorial.

The Haymarket Square riot of May 4, 1886, was planned by George Engel, a German immigrant. Engel was a member of the (Communist) International before founding the Socialistic Labor Party of North America. At Haymarket Square, he and a group of anarchists attacked a congregation of police officers, resulting in the deaths of eight municipal policemen and maiming and wounding sixty-eight others. The tomcat of history breeds its copycats: the Haymarket police memorial was bombed by the Weathermen, a radical wing of the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), on October 7, 1969, four months after the SDS split into Revolutionary Youth Movements I and II. RYM-I was the nonviolent arm or mass organization; RYM-II was the violent arm, also known as the Weathermen or National Weather Bureau. The split occurred in June 1969 at a convention in Chicago. Whether the ashes of Haywood were disturbed by the 1969 SDS bombing is not recorded. The SDS radicals were later to enter tragically into the history of Albert Canwell and his attorney, Glenn Harmon.

From an early date and before his organization received its current title, Darrow served on the national committee of the American Civil Liberties Union. In popular contemporary parlance, ACLU is said to mean, All Commies Love Us. Darrow was active in the defense of Communist criminal-support organizations, including the National Mooney-Billings Committee and the Sacco-Vanzetti National League of the 1920s. Felix Frankfurter, a counsel in the Mooney-Billings criminal trials is important in some of the following chapters. He was condemned by President Theodore Roosevelt for an attitude which seems to me to be fundamentally that of Trotsky and the other Bolshevik leaders in Russia.

Darrow (1857–1938) was active in the Soviet reconstruction program, Russian Reconstruction Farms (1925). He was a latecomer to the radical left—the Communist Manifesto appeared in 1848; the International’s recorded minutes date from 1864. (Until the organization of the Communist Party-USA in 1919, party members were members of the International party.)

Darrow’s law career began when he was admitted to the bar in 1878. Darrow unsuccessfully defended the thrill-seeking deviates, Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, charged in 1924 with killing Bobby Franks of Chicago.

With Dudley F. Malone and ACLU official Arthur Garfield Hays, Darrow defended John T. Scopes in the 1925 Tennessee evolution case. Darrow sought to make an evolved monkey of the state’s attorney, William Jennings Bryan. And Bryan, his pride, confidence and religious faith dishonored, died a few days after the trial.

Darrow’s mythical reputation as an attorney was recognized with an appointment by President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration to the chairmanship of the National Recovery Administration’s review board in 1934, before the 1933 National Recovery Act was declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court on May 27, 1935.

Arthur Garfield Hays, co-counsel with Darrow for defendant Scopes, supported Communists charged in Germany with setting the Reichstag fire in Berlin on February 27, 1933. In this arson, Dutch suspect, Communist Marinus van der Lubbe was found by authorities on scene and arrested. Also arrested were Ernst Tangler and three Bulgarian Comintern officials (Georgi Dimitrov, Blagoi Popov, and Vasil Tanev) who were all implicated. Presidential adviser Felix Frankfurter, in the manner of the later former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark (defender of ousted Iraqi President Saddam Hussein) has been described as sending the U.S. Communist delegation to Europe in support of the Reichstag suspects; the delegation included Hays, who acted as one of the judges in a propaganda trial of the suspects.

The Soviets’ notorious propaganda minister, Willi Muenzenberg, set up the mock trial that was used to launder Soviet involvement and blame unnamed Nazis. Muenzenberg, the brilliant mind behind the successful Communist front movement worldwide, which financed Communist satellite parties everywhere, fell out of favor and was murdered in 1940, presumably by the Soviet secret police.

While still in the United States, Big Bill Haywood organized the Industrial Workers of the World, which used force to recruit union members. The IWW toughs, or Wobblies, hammered railroad spikes into sawmill logs to break saw blades (an act that often mangled workmen), torched American forests, and destroyed farmers’ combines to prevent crop harvests. They descended from trains, ate their fill at restaurants and left without paying. During World War I, Wobblies attempted to strike plants producing war materiel and assisted conscientious objectors in order to undermine the United States military services that opposed Germany. Germany was then the center of Marxist Communism and German was the common language of American Communists until many years after the 1917 revolution, as Whittaker Chambers attested in Witness. German capitalists provided financing for the Bolsheviks and, as General Alexeyev noted in November 1917, officers of the German General Staff played leading roles in the Bolshevik government and exercise[d] direct control over affairs of state. [Heresch, 160]

On November 5, 1916, Wobblies tangled with peace-keeping forces in Everett, Washington, arriving at a dock on the ship Verona. The confrontation between mostly foreign-born agitators and sheriffs’ personnel was bloody and resulted in several arrests.

Three years later, Wobblies were charged with ambushing and killing six Legionnaires at a patriotic parade in Centralia, Washington. Although seven Wobblies were convicted of murder in this plot, Communists later alleged falsely that the incident had been precipitated when veterans attacked an IWW hall. State Senator (1935–41) Mary Farquharson of Seattle and attorney Benjamin Kizer of Spokane, both later ACLU activists and propagandists, moved to free the Wobblies convicted of the ambush, an effort that eventually succeeded, after the heat was off. Farquharson was a member of the Fellowship of Reconciliation and an advocate of trade with Communist Cuba. Kizer was to become a lifelong antagonist and dissembler in vocal opposition to Al Canwell.

One of the IWW’s doctrines was based on Marxist teachings regarding the general strike. When such a strike was orchestrated in Seattle, Mayor Ole Hanson responded vigorously and in 1920 wrote Americanism versus Bolshevism, linking contemporary IWW activity with Soviet foreign policy. As expert Suzanne Labin reported to NATO, the fact that some Americans could be influenced to collaborate with Soviet foreign policy was a concept that the USSR later would spend up to $3 billion annually to achieve—quite successfully—with ubiquitous propaganda.

During Al’s youth, before he abandoned childhood in 1921 at the age of fourteen and left home to wander, he spent time in libraries studying Bolshevism, Socialism, and Communism and argued against Marxism with a boyhood acquaintance, Bull Birge in Underhill Park in Spokane, Washington. Harvey Birge’s nickname stuck because of the Marxist bull that he was peddling. At maturity, Birge found a useful position as telegrapher for the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railways when railroad crews were targets of recruitment into the Communist Party, and the unions championed the workers’ cause in exchange for cash flow. (A dozen of the Congress of Industrial Organizations unions were later forced out of the Communist-controlled CIO before the American Federation of Labor would endorse a merger.) An example of how the money was diverted: House Committee on Un-American Activities (HCUA) Chairman Martin Dies stated that the CIO contributed $35,000 to $40,000 to his opponent, in order to remove Dies from Congress.

Always, the Steunenberg murder and the brazen antics of the IWW in Spokane, Everett, Centralia, and Seattle informed Al’s opinion, along with a chronicle of continuous Communist activity that solidified his anti-Communist resolve. His patriotic parents’ hard-earned anti-Communist opinions endorsed his own. His father always referred to the Bullsheviks and kept his firearms in working order.

Al learned by study and analysis that Washington State was where invading Soviet troops were expected to enter the United States for the impending World War III between the States and the Soviet Union. The Soviets needed to establish a fifth column in the Northwest, invaluable to the preparation and implementation of that war. (See Through the Eyes of the Enemy by Stanislav Lunev, former GRU colonel, Regnery Publishing, Inc., 1998.)

On August 22, 1922, the federal government raided a meeting of Communist strategists at Bridgman, Michigan, that included such prominent party members as Eugene V. Debs, William Z. Foster, Mother Jones, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and her stiletto-wielding husband, Carlo Tresca. Tresca was later assassinated by Soviet secret police agent Sormenti (Carlos Contreras) after he had a dispute with George Mink, one of the Communist Party’s top assassins assigned to Special Tasks.

The Bridgman raid proved unequivocally that the Communist Party, already international but at that time centered in Germany, intended to consolidate its gains in Russia and capture America, as well as all other nations. The strategy was to win internal support for Communism’s foreign policies prior to the anticipated military conflict. This tactic was to be skillfully disguised as humane regard for America’s underprivileged and minorities, particularly those in the work force. The party used such causes to raise funds. Simultaneously the party was to target America’s opinion-shaping and power-holding media by infiltration, payoffs, and massive but often subtle propaganda. Party members were expected to give up their personal futures and work continually to accomplish these goals. The fifth column established in this way was successful far beyond a casual critic’s expectations.

One of the first exposés of Communist intent was published by The Beckwith Press in 1924, Reds in America, by R.M. Whitney. The book was immediately placed in Canwell’s library, joined later by all the government reports on Communism that Al could obtain, and every important American or Canadian exposé of Communist activity by defectors or experts. Author Whitney gave, in fourteen chapters, a primer on the Communist agenda and its total war concept excerpted from a barrel of Communist documents found during the raid at Bridgman, Michigan. Reds had blueprints for not only penetrating newspapers, schools, colleges, and publishing houses, but for organizing and penetrating legal associations. Members were to support the American League to Limit Armaments to keep the United States out of war with Germany (the League became the American Civil Liberties Union), to capture agrarian and industrial sectors through demonstrations and unionizing, and to dominate literature, stage, movies, government, women’s clubs, black programs, and the military.

Decades later, on January 10, 1963, Democratic Senator Thomas J. Dodd of Connecticut described the strategy in a statement published in hearings on the Pacifica Foundation, Part 1:

We have been keenly and increasingly mindful of what the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation has so well stated, that the Communists have infiltrated every conceivable sphere of activity, youth groups, radio, television and motion picture industries; church, school, educational and cultural groups; the press, national minority groups, and civil and political units.

The year after Whitney’s book was released, Whittaker Chambers joined the Communist Party (1925). Two years later, Stalin successfully took over the Soviet government and began consolidating his power. (And in two more years, Chambers was listed as the translator in Grosset & Dunlap’s 1929 reprint of Austrian Felix Salten’s book, Bambi.)

Albert Canwell, already an astute student of world Communism at the age of seventeen, absorbed Whitney’s book like a sponge. His earlier studies made it possible to observe the Soviet tree now growing from its seed imported from Germany into a tall tree with leaves and branches and the prospect of over-towering the United States as it did Russia. At times it seemed to Al that many of his acquaintances were political morons repeating Communist propaganda like robots; that they were ignorant of the dark wings that might one day cover their destiny. If that happened, all the martyrdom of peace-keepers such as Democratic Governor Steunenberg, would be for naught. And, as in all countries conquered by Reds, all opponents of totalitarian Communism in the captured United States would simply be shot.

In the Sixties, when Al told me about the murder of Idaho’s former governor, I had never heard of Steunenberg. By the 1960s, Steunenberg was only one of an estimated eighty-five million to one hundred million victims of Marxist imperialism and police state terror. [Stéphane Courtois, Le Livre Noir du Communism] Al, well aware that Communism was a criminal conspiracy, made it clear that, though slaughter had been effective in capturing Russia and numerous other countries large and small, a more subtle approach was being used initially to achieve the American mountain top. He knew that reaching the United States summit depended as much on the recreational mountain climbers who donated money (in addition to union dues), as on the Red Sherpas who led them. He hoped to help block their common ascent.

Finlandia and the Red Terror

Finland was one of the numerous countries plagued by Soviet aggression. Events relating to that nation were to cross paths with Albert Canwell several decades later—in the person of Ward Warren, a witness for the legislative investigating Committee that Canwell chaired in 1947–48.

Finland had been prey to czarist Russia prior to 1917 and finally threw off the yoke of the Russian czar by declaring independence on December 6, 1917. Hoping to be greeted with Groetjes! by the Finns, the infant Soviet Union gave diplomatic recognition to Finland’s new administration only twenty-five days after its declaration of independence. By March 1916, the Communist Fifth Column organizers of the USSR had assembled a Soviet-style provisional government for Finland and expanded the Red Army, or Red Guards, who were installed as militia. Bolsheviks now replaced the police with strike committees and moved to eliminate all non-Communist competition. Finland soon was in the throes of a civil war between the Bolsheviks’ Red Guard factions and the White Army of General C.G.E. Mannerheim.

Mannerheim had served Czarist Russia’s Imperial Army for thirty years, along with other Swedish-speaking Finns, and led the Thirteenth Vladimir Regiment of the Uhlans in 1909. (The composer C. Bohm commemorated the Uhlans, in the powerful Attaque des Uhlans [Charge of the Uhlans, Opus 213]). Mannerheim severed his support of Russia when the Bolsheviks constricted that nation in their serpentine coils. After leading the Finns in the War of Independence, Mannerheim’s honorable service for Finland was recognized and he became the country’s president.

Among those who opposed Bolshevik occupation of the Scandinavian countries was Finnish composer Jean Julius Christian Sibelius, whose Finlandia has been recommended to replace the Finnish national anthem, Maamme. Sibelius studied music under Fuchs Wegelius, Albert Ernst Anton Becker and, in Vienna, Karl Goldmark, uncle of Jonathan Goldmark (1917–79) of Washington State. Jonathan or John Goldmark will be brought into this narrative later as a subject who sued Albert Canwell for libel. Sibelius was, for a time, a political prisoner in his home north of Helsinki, which was raided by Bolsheviks looking for arms. During the sensational trial of espionage agent Alger Hiss, newsmen presented a recording of Sibelius’ First Symphony as a symbolic gift to the exposé witness Whittaker Chambers. [Chambers, 716]

Finnish native Nestor Luoma obtained his U.S. citizenship in 1903 and in 1912 moved to Aberdeen, Washington, with fellow immigrant Sally K. Anderson. The same year, Sally gave birth to their daughter, Ruth—and that year Finland became involved in the Great War. Oddly and perhaps significantly, also in 1912 Sally Anderson Luoma and her daughter went to Finland for a protracted stay. A second daughter, Laura Luoma, was born there on January 30, 1914. At this time, Communists were recruiting industriously in that country and promoting the War of Liberation to free Finland from czarist Russia in order to install a Bolshevik satrapy there. What part Sally Luoma played in that conflict is unknown, but she returned to Aberdeen after World War I and her Finnish-born daughter, Laura, became an active Communist in Washington State.

Nineteen thirty-nine

After Laura Luoma and her mother Sally returned to America, Laura married on April 6, 1935, in Aberdeen. The same year, the entire Finnish Soviet espionage apparatus was arrested in Finland. [Chambers, 387] Nevertheless, Laura and her husband, Richard (Dick) Shelton Law, while residing in the home of her parents in Aberdeen, dedicated their time to recruiting for labor unions and the Communist Party, essentially one and the same task. Dick Law was a small-time, sometimes violent, ex-convict who had spent time between 1930 and 1932 in the Oregon State Penitentiary as Prisoner No. 12326. He also was an executive board member of the International Woodworkers of America who exploited the good offices of his union to finance his travel, instruct members whom to vote for, and tell them which issues to protest or support. Dick Law’s union opposed the Neutrality Act of April 29, 1939, hoping, rather, that the United States would join the fight against Nazi Germany, a perceived enemy of the USSR. The union flip-flopped when the Soviet-Nazi Pact (also called the Stalin-Hitler or Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact) demanded U.S. neutrality four months later. The flip-flopped party line was: stay neutral now that the USSR and Hitler’s Germany are allies. On September 17, 1939, the USSR ordered her troops to march into Poland.

When the Soviet Union signed the pact of non-aggression with Hitler’s Germany on August 23, 1939, Law’s union was supplied with brochures that sneered, The Yanks are Not Coming. When the Communist Party line shifted after Hitler turned on his erstwhile ally on June 22, 1941, Communist brochures’ new slogan changed to We’re Coming, and in case the word we’re was too imprecise, illustrated their brochures with a hammer and sickle. It was more than patriotic troops who were coming. The Communist Party claimed to have recruited 50,000 members in the U.S. armed forces, according to statistics provided by the Dies Committee!

From June 22 to September 30, 1941, Soviet agent Harry Hopkins, who sometimes lived in the Roosevelt White House, set in motion pre-Lend Lease to the USSR. Lend Lease, nominally under Edward R. Stettinius, Jr. and later Leo T. Crowley, functioned from March 11, 1941, until September 20, 1945, with Hopkins arranging the shipment of supplies to the USSR under the Soviet Protocol Committee, which he headed. These shipments totaled $11.3 billion worth of goods, including a piano and tobacco pipe for Stalin, numerous black suitcases filled with details about American industries, stolen top-secret documents, radioactive materials and blueprints for building an atom bomb. This material was shipped to the Soviet Union out of Newark, New Jersey and Great Falls, Montana. Like Alger Hiss, Harry Hopkins accompanied President Franklin Roosevelt to all important wartime conferences from 1941. Persons with whom Al Canwell discussed a spy house at Accokeek, Maryland, believed that Harry Hopkins selected the Accokeek location for a Bloomsbury-style spy nest.

The same year that she married, 1935, Laura Luoma participated in a labor strike in Aberdeen, Washington. But Laura kept her childhood Bible and church hymnal. [Aberdeen P.D., 83] This was not entirely contradictory for atheistic Communists. In 1907, the year of the completely Germanized Second International or Comintern, English-born Chicago Methodist minister Harry F. Ward established or co-opted the Methodist Federation for Social Service. The MFSS was later called Methodist Federation for Social Action or MFSA. Joseph Kornfeder described MFSS/MFSA as an organization formed by non-Communists and captured by the party.

The MFSA head, Harry F. Ward, became an active supporter of Communist James W. Ford and Stalinist William Z. Foster in their Communist Party bids for United States presidency and vice-presidency (1932, 1936, 1940). Their campaigns were not intended to place either in office; they were to serve as a springboard to discussion, to provide arguing points, spread propaganda cheaply to every voter, and swell the party’s coffers with contributions.

Ward was also chairman of the ACLU. He is mentioned hundreds of times in thirteen different hearings of the HCUA between 1938 and 1954. Although his activities marched in lockstep with the Communist Peace Offensive, Harry F. Ward was never arrested—a religious posture is the best shield against governmental retribution: one can claim to be a lover of world peace. (Because a loophole of immunity was granted to religious representatives by the McCarran Act, the KGB also took advantage of this, sending Russian Orthodox secret agents into the United States. On one occasion, a fake beard attached with elastic was worn by one such Soviet metropolitan. It accidentally pulled away from his chin when he slammed his taxi door. A photo of the incident made national news and was a subject of amusement.)

The MFSA began its effective penetration of Protestant churches in the United States, working with and through the YMCA, the Federal (later, National) Council of Churches, the ACLU, the League for Industrial Democracy, and International Labor Defense, which defended Communist union organizers who were in legal trouble. Laura Luoma Law attended church services in the same denomination as that of Methodist Episcopal Bishop Francis J. McConnell, President of the MFSA. The MFSA and the Don Miller masquerade, details of which are related in other chapters, were major instruments in the defeat of Al Canwell when he ran for office in Washington State.

Aberdeen’s Communist Party, to which the Laws belonged and whose secretary was Heine P. Huff, quickly dominated Red Finn Hall in Aberdeen and began organizing civic unrest, which widened the door for union recruitment. In December 1938, the Red Finns, who essentially controlled the local Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) contingent, and other recruits who met in Red Finn Hall, orchestrated a four-day riot in Aberdeen, which belied their later published concern for law and order.

In Russia, as well, law and order was whatever the Party said it was. After Lenin’s death in 1924, when Josef Stalin consolidated his dictatorial control, Stalin moved to eliminate the competition so that the year 1938 was more brutal in the USSR than it was in Aberdeen. Between 1925 and 1938 top revolutionaries were executed, including Bukharin, Kamenev, Aleksei Rykov, and Zinovyev. Eight of the Red Army’s top generals and countless less-well-known citizens met the same fate. Among those who disappeared at this time were the leaders of non-Russian nationalities, such as the Finnish leaders. Censorship sometimes prevented citizens from learning the truth about political murders.

The month after the Republic of Poland capitulated to Germany and her Soviet ally, the Soviet army invaded Finland.

Communists throughout the world began to rethink their loyalty to the imperialist Communist Party that allegedly opposed offensive war and flavored vodka with words such as democracy and republic.

With the party threatened by disintegration, one of Moscow’s most vicious killers, George Mink, was sent to the United States to weed the Party. Mink was described by Whittaker Chambers as a subject who personally had supervised the murders of anti-Stalinists in the Spanish Republic’s jails during the Spanish Civil War (1936–39).

One of the Americans believed to be considering a break with the party was Laura Luoma Law, now the mother of a three-year-old son. In 1939 she had received condolences for losing a baby. Whether this loss was by miscarriage or abortion is not known for, as Whittaker Chambers pointed out and as any historian is aware, abortion has always been looked on with favor by the Communist Party. [Chambers, 325] Perhaps her loss, along with the aggressive invasion of her homeland by Soviets caused a change in her loyalties.

Laura’s theme (1940)

On the evening of January 5, 1940, Laura was at home with her son, her husband, and other family members. A dinner was shared, and Laura’s parents left for the cinema, driven there by Dick Law. Dick then allegedly attended a union meeting. Laura was left at home alone with her toddler.

Laura’s parents returned from the theater to an unanticipated and ghastly scene. Laura’s body is shown in crime scene photos stretched on the living room floor in front of a sofa, her head crushed by multiple blows and seven puncture wounds to her body. Investigator L. May described the scene: there were blood spots on a chair, spatters on the west wall from the ceiling downwards and from the davenport to the ceiling upwards, showing blood thrown from the weapon on the rising and falling stroke[s]. There was a large stain on the davenport. Eyeglasses with broken lenses and temples lay on the floor. Printed contents of a large box were scattered about the living room. A broken slat from a window shade lay near the davenport where Laura was thought to have been doing needle work. A crochet magazine, toy locomotive, a child’s top, a doll, the day’s newspaper, and a child’s sweater contrasted the previous domestic scene with what had been a violent struggle. Many of these items were spattered with blood.

A time-consuming investigation followed. By February 24, 1940, at least twenty-two witnesses had been interviewed, hundreds of evidentiary items had been catalogued, materials had been sent to the FBI for analysis and information had been exchanged.

An FBI letter in the Aberdeen police files refers to correspondence with Dick Law dated December 19, 1939, regarding a possible shortage of union funds. This would have related to a letter from Harry Sweeney, saying that Sweeney while on a drunk lost an unknown amount of union money. He asked Law for $54. This incident was not offered as a motive for murder, but there was no lack of theories, some anonymous, and there were elements to support each crime theory. According to police files, suggestions included:

Anti-Communists, who were referred to as anti-union, anti-democratic, un-American, etc., by the numerous Communists interested in the case, were believed by Communists to have been the red-baiters who trashed Red Finn Hall a few weeks earlier. The anonymous Red Finn Hall offenders were suggested as suspects in the murder.

Laura Law was planning to leave the Communist Party, distraught over the Soviet invasion of Finland, the murder of Finnish leaders, and presumably also the Soviet-Nazi Pact, which was announced about four and one-half months before Law’s home invasion. Was she killed by fellow Communists?

Dick Law allegedly had a mistress and he and she singly or together killed Laura in a classic triangle. Witnesses testified to an intimate relationship between Dick Law and Helen Sobolseki, the office manager for the International Woodworkers of America, Dick’s union. An outraged Sobolseki filed a $100,000 libel suit against Attorney General Krause, his Deputy Paul Manley, and witnesses Ruth Sobell and Anne Batchelor. The police took blood-stained evidence cut from the trunk floor and from the running board of Dick Law’s car but could only theorize his or their participation.

Or Laura Law was killed by a professional killer from the OGPU, the joint state political directorate, (a Soviet secret police agency, and integral to the all-union NKVD), a theory offered during a September 8, 1950, deportation hearing by witness Paul Crouch, an ex-Communist. Crouch has been described as a friend of Laura Law. He had served time in prison for recruiting servicemen for the USSR while in the U.S. Army stationed in Hawaii. He later was an instructor for Moscow’s Military Sciences and Tactics schools in the United States. During a 1950 hearing, Crouch asserted that the Soviets sent assassin George Mink to the United States at about the time of the murder to purge the Communist Party-USA. Crouch claimed to have spoken with federal investigators and a plan was made officially to release the information that the OGPU had killed Laura Law. Seattle attorney John Caughlan (1909–99) served as defense counsel for the ten proposed Communist deportees at the 1950 hearing in which Crouch testified.

Testimony revealing Caughlan’s clandestine activities after Laura’s murder was given by former Communist Ward Warren, before the Canwell Committee (although Warren is listed only once in the Aberdeen Police Department archival inventory pertaining to the Laura Law murder).

There was no dispute that the Finnish Workers Hall had been ransacked and looted a few weeks previous, and that the perpetrators had not been identified. A Grays Harbor Civil Rights Committee (GHCRC) was organized on January 20, 1940, with union support, and made much of this incident. It offered alibis for Dick Law in the murder investigation, calling the case a frame-up, and made demands on the investigators.

The Dick Law faction issued a six-page critique of the investigation sprinkled with Pavlovian trigger words, oddly wondering why Aberdeen police instead of the county sheriff were investigating a crime within their municipality, calling the inquest into the crime farcical, noting the unflattering nickname of Aberdeen was little Soviet, condemning mob hysteria, witch hunting, and red-baiting. The author or authors of the critique thought Laura was killed by greedy and ambitious and ruthless men and referred in the plural to murderers. The psychic author, nevertheless, closed on a note of buena esperanza, that witch hunting, rioting, red-baiting and professional patriotism for political purposes are definitely at an end in this country. The GHCRC stood in opposition to the anti-Communist Grays Harbor Citizens Committee and the Ministerial Association, both of which gave their support to law enforcement.

Acting secretary of the ACLU’s Seattle Branch, Mary Farquharson, published her own complaint against mob violence, focusing on Red Finn Hall and deflecting suspicion from the Communist Party. She and Ben Kizer were the subjects who were involved in freeing the 1919 Centralia assassins from prison.

The Grays Harbor/Pacific County Communist Party rose to the support of Dick Law. The party addressed all our comrades and fellow workers. They declared Dick Law innocent, established the Defenders of Comrade Dick Law, and distributed bulletins calling Law a sincere follower of Josef Stalin, a definition no one disputed. They threw in the contemporary propaganda line: an invitation to join the party, an attack on capitalism, and an attack on the largely non-Communist American Federation of Labor. The CIO slogan in its 1937 promotional propaganda was, Join the CIO and help build a Soviet America, found in literature in Law’s home and issued by the Constitutional Educational League of New Haven, Connecticut.

Although the party had ACLU volunteer attorneys standing by to defend Dick, a far-reaching fund appeal called for donations—and they came from at least as far away as Minnesota.

Dick Law, Laura’s parents, and the Grays Harbor Civil Rights Committee were defended by attorneys John Caughlan and Irvin Goldman. Caughlan was general counsel for the International Woodworkers of America, an ACLU member, and worked for a number of Communist popular fronts. He was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, called a bulwark of the Communist Party by federal investigators. He was a frequent subject during interviews by the 1947–48 Canwell Committee hearings, in which Caughlan was identified as a Communist Party member. His disdain for the witnesses at the Canwell hearings was revealed when, according to a column by reporter Jim Sparks of Spokane’s The Spokesman Review, he referred to Al’s expert witnesses as Al’s traveling menagerie.

Many names were tossed about during the police investigation. The anti-Communist Grays Harbor Citizens Committee bulletin, Shall we have Communism in full force in Grays Harbor? listed as pro-Communists: Jerome Jiff, Richard Law, Art Anderson, G.D. Smethers, Jess Woodward, and Joe Kit Koski. Material collected by police included names of Communists who later quit the party; e.g., Louis Budenz and Howard Costigan, who were interviewed by staff of the Canwell Committee. The Canwell hearings included references to Harry Bridges, whose wife, under armed guard, testified that Harry, long-time head of the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, was a member of the Communist Party; Dick Law had conferred with Bridges on several occasions.

Among the hundreds of pieces of evidence confiscated by authorities from the Law home were numerous Communist Party items: publications, letters, membership lists, cards, and applications. There were other lists—of license plate numbers, car descriptions, names and addresses of scabs and pickets. Investigators also found a black notebook in which had been pasted clippings detailing the Soviet invasion of Finland.

The murderer of Finnish-born Laura Law was never indicted. In 1950, the Civil Rights Congress, which was listed by the federal government as a Communist front organization, published its own version of the case as The Truth in the Case of Laura Law—Murdered Labor Leader. The party take on the case is that she was killed by those who opposed her union activity, though she was considerably less active than her husband, who was never harmed. But such an approach is intended to exonerate the Communist Party, a frequent party to murder.

Attorneys Irvin Goodman and John Caughlan wrote, They were called Reds, in which they included a chapter: Laura Law, murdered labor leader. Their manuscript has not been published.

Law also is mentioned in the Papers of Julia Ruuttila 1870-2004, archived by Washington State University. Included is the heavily redacted FBI record of Ruuttila’s socialist/Communist activity that Ruuttila obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. She was especially interested in Finland; many Finnish immigrants had taken residence in Astoria, Oregon, where she was active.

In June 1983, Timothy Frederick of the Washington State Archives Oral History Program discovered the thick Aberdeen law enforcement case file relating to the Law investigation and had it transferred to the Secretary of State’s archives in Olympia. An inventory of the data in storage was prepared and is available to researchers. The original file helped illuminate the party’s activities in Washington State and validated Al’s informed opposition to the party’s criminal enterprise.

Richard (Dick) Shelton Law reportedly committed suicide in 1953.

CHAPTER TWO

Home and Away

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The Canwell-Espelund connection (1907)

Albert Canwell was born in Spokane, Washington, on January 11, 1907, although during a newspaper interview I transcribed on May 14, 1998, (when he was ninety-one years of age and still had a remarkable memory), he mistakenly gave the year as 1909. His son, Marshall, given to occasional outbursts of impertinence, corrected, It was 1907, you old goat!

Al’s father’s English genes were rumored to have come from a dissident Italian priest who escaped to England and changed his name to Canwell, a possibly apocryphal story that Al liked to repeat. Al’s father’s name, Adelbert Lee Canwell, supplied the middle names for two of Al’s five siblings, Claude Adelbert and James Lee Canwell.

In 1892, Adelbert served with the U.S. Cavalry at Fort Apache, in Geronimo country, as an Indian fighter. At Fort San Carlos, he received perfect scores as a marksman in all classifications of shooting. He personally trained cavalry horses using a sand lot method. Later, Adelbert accompanied the Glenn Expedition to Alaska as a paramedic. There, the Canwell Glacier was named for him.

Albert inherited his father’s talent with firearms. While employed by International News Photos about 1938, he maintained his skills by throwing his camera flash bulbs into the air and shooting them before they fell to the ground. Using a seven-shot Harrington Richard .22 revolver, he could hit the bulbs in six consecutive shots. His father told him that he was an exhibitionist. Later, Al would take his friends, attorney Harold Gleason, Al Feyerabend (a retailer of law enforcement supplies), and Ted Crosby (Bing’s brother) to the old Canwell homestead on Mount Spokane to shoot. Al joked about how infertile the homestead was and, alluding to the prolific Canwell patriarch and disregarding his usual self-censorship, said rather indelicately that the only thing it could raise was an erection.

Al’s mother was Norwegian with the name of Ingeborg Ida Christina Espelund Canwell. Her parents had traveled from Kansas to Walla Walla, Washington, in about 1880 as pioneers. Albert inherited his mother’s blond Norwegian hair, but as a young boy