Agricultural Adjustment Administration
Ware group
Works Progress Administration
Committee for Industrial Organization
Lee Pressman was an American government official and secret Communist.[1]
Pressman attended Harvard Law School with Alger Hiss, and served as editor of the Harvard Law Review,[2] later joining (together with Hiss)[3] the International Juridical Association (IJA), which "consistently followed the Communist Party line."[4]
In 1933, Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace appointed Pressman assistant general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration; Pressman subsequently recruited Hiss and Nathan Witt into that office.[5] AAA administrator George Peek resigned in protest, writing, that "in the legal division were formed the plans which eventually turned the AAA from a device to aid the farmers into a device to introduce the collectivist system of agriculture into this country."[6]
Pressman would eventually testify that he had at the time been a member of the Ware group, an underground group of Communists in the Federal government.[7] Pressman would also corroborate Whittaker Chambers' identification of Witt, John Abt and Charles Kramer as members of this Communist cell[8] and admit under oath that he recognized Chambers.[9]
Then he was general counsel in the Works Progress Administration from 1935, appointed by Harry L. Hopkins. Later in 1935 he was general counsel of the Resettlement Administration, appointed by Rexford G. Tugwell. After leaving government in June 1936 he became general counsel for the Committee for Industrial Organization (CIO) and for the Steel Workers' Organizing Committee. In March 1937 he became General Counsel for the Textile Workers' Organizing Committee.
In the 1930s Pressman was also a member of the Ware group, a group of American citizens employed in the United States government who considered Marxist ideologies a solution to the Great Depression, while secretly working for Soviet intelligence. As communists, Pressman and the members of the group were pledged to the violent overthrow of the United States government. In 1950 Pressman admitted to having been a secret member in 1934-35 and an ideological ally thereafter.
Lee Pressman was responsible for getting Alger Hiss the appointment as counsel for the Nye committee.[10]
Categories: [KGB Agents and Sources] [American Jews]