Peter Duffy is an author and journalist in New York. 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.

Samuel Dickstein was short and silver-haired, “a slim little man in a natty gray suit,” the New York Times once characterized him. 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.

But 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. 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. If anyone can be credited (or blamed) with introducing the phrase “un-American activities” into the nation’s lexicon, it is he. 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. Thomas L. Blanton of Texas on the House floor. (Blanton appears to have declined.)


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. 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. He then went about the time-honored practice of being forgotten.

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. 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. To this day, Sam Dickstein is the only known U.S. representative to have served as a covert agent for a foreign power. His codename was Crook.

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. 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.”

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Born in Vilnius, Lithuania, in 1885, Dickstein immigrated with his religious Jewish parents to the Lower East Side as a small child. 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. 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. “Before he had completely lost his accent, Sam was sent to school where Bessie knew he would learn the fundamentals of Americanism. Her greatest pleasure was to hear her son sing, dreadfully out of tune, ‘My Country ‘Tis of Thee.’ ”

After 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. He would claim that over the course of his career he represented 30,000 slum dwellers free of charge. 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. 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. government, Constitution or military.

Dickstein didn’t achieve a degree of prominence in Congress until the Democrats took control of the House following the 1930 midterms and Tammany chieftains insisted that he be named to lead the Committee on Immigration and Naturalization. From this perch, he began his career as a scourge of the disloyal.

Although he made a habit of denouncing Communists (“highbinders and hoodlums”), Dickstein was really out for the fascists. In late 1933, less than a year after Adolf Hitler came to power, Dickstein convened informal and unfunded hearings on “Nazi Propaganda Activities by Aliens in the U.S.,” which was a response to a public controversy in New York surrounding a Reich-assigned agitator who sought to intimidate German Americans into joining a Nazi front called the Friends of the New Germany. Over the course of five sessions, witnesses alleged that emissaries of the Third Reich were delivering printed matter, military uniforms, propaganda films and spy orders to pro-Nazi operatives in this country. During one hearing, Dickstein questioned a man publicly identified only as Mr. X, who said that Nazi Germany’s ultimate goal was to establish “an absolute dictatorship in the United States.”

On NBC radio, Dickstein declared that he had unearthed “sufficient evidence to define the Nazi government here as the most dangerous threat to our democracy that has ever existed.” In March 1934, he convinced the House to pass his resolution establishing what was officially titled the “Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities.” Let history record that HUAC began principally as a hunt for Nazi spies not Communist ones. Declining the chairmanship because as a foreign-born Jew he would be subject to “unkind criticism by certain persons or organizations,” Dickstein, who was named vice chair, conceded the gavel to John W. McCormack, the Irish Catholic member from South Boston and future speaker of the House.

The McCormack-Dickstein Committee, as it was commonly known, did not lack for headlines during its brief life in the summer and fall of 1934. The hearings revealed that prominent PR firms were accepting Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels’ money to improve National Socialism’s image in the United States. German-American supporters of Hitler took the witness chair and spoke candidly about their loyalty to the Nazi creed. The Fuehrer “represents the racial feelings of every German in the world, no matter where he is born or no matter where he lives,” said one. The most spectacular disclosure had no direct Nazi connection: A retired Marine Corps major general named Smedley Butler claimed that wealthy anti-Roosevelt financiers with ties to veterans’ groups asked him to lead a Mussolini-like march on the capital city with the intent of seizing power.

Yet Dickstein did not emerge from his turn on the national stage with his reputation burnished. “The public is sick and tired of the red herrings Vice Chairman Dickstein has dangled (at the taxpayers’ expense) in order to keep his name on the front page,” said one letter to the editor of the New York Herald Tribune. His congressional colleagues didn’t appreciate how his “itch and flair for publicity and advertisement,” in the words of Rep. Lindsay Warren of North Carolina, was rather more efficacious than their own. When he made the accurate statement that Adolf Hitler was “the madman of Germany” in the summer of 1935, during a period when the U.S. government was keen to maintain friendly relations with Nazi Germany, nobody much paid attention.

By early 1937, Dickstein had spent two years trying to whip up support for a more expansive un-American activities committee when he came up with a novel tactic—he put a precise figure on the extent of Nazi infiltration of the United States. “I will name you 100 spies who have entered this country from a friendly government for the purpose of furthering the progress of this propaganda,” he said. He claimed they were led by Fritz Kuhn, the proud Hitlerite who had assumed control of the Friends of the New Germany and renamed it the German American Bund without Berlin’s guidance. Kuhn countered, “Dickstein, not I, is one of the country’s biggest enemies. I think he is a spy for Soviet Russia.” He wasn’t. At least not yet.

After his legislation for a new sedition-hunting committee was tabled as “just a lot of noise that will bring loss of prestige to Congress” (Rep. Maury Maverick of Texas), Dickstein marched to the House floor and read out the names of 46 “expert spies and agitators,” most of whom held repugnant political views but had broken no laws. He pointed his finger at such figures as “Willie Bolle—Owner of furniture store at 1495 Third Avenue, New York City, and a notorious Nazi sympathizer.” The Herald Tribune noted that Dickstein’s promised list had shrunk from 100 names to only 46—“a loss of 54 percent. With cooler weather, it may shrink still further.”

At about this time, in the middle of 1937, Dickstein had his first contact with the NKVD, a predecessor agency of the KGB. According to the files uncovered and analyzed by Weinstein and Vassiliev for The Haunted Wood, an Austrian working for the Soviets approached him and asked for help in securing American citizenship. Dickstein told the man that the quota for Austrian immigrants was filled but for $3,000 he would see what he could do. Dickstein said he had “settled dozens” in a similarly illegal fashion, according to the NKVD memo on the meeting. Moscow concluded that Dickstein was “heading a criminal gang that was involved in shady businesses, selling passports, illegal smuggling of people, [and] getting citizenship,” a shocking allegation even if it wasn’t lodged against the chairman of the Immigration and Naturalization Committee and an elected official who represented a district with many foreign-born residents pining for legal status.

In December 1937, Dickstein approached the Soviet ambassador in Washington, spoke of his “friendly attitude toward the Soviet Union,” and offered information on a Russian fascist group for $5,000 to $6,000. The Soviets agreed to hear him out but refused to pay such a vast sum for “widely known” material. When Dickstein demanded a $2,500-a-month salary to keep up the flow, his Soviet handler, “Igor,” would go no further than $500. The typical American family earned about $1,800 a year in 1937.

Dickstein’s bargaining position improved in the spring of 1938, when public concern over Hitler’s forcible annexation (or Anschluss) of Austria renewed interest in the possibility of another un-American tribunal. With the expectation that he would be named as a key figure on the panel, Dickstein struck a deal with Igor, agreeing to provide the Soviet Union with materials on fascists uncovered by the committee and to steer its investigators away from looking into Communists. His pay would be $1,250 a month.

“We are fully aware whom we are dealing with,” says one NKVD memo. “ ‘Crook’ is completely justifying his code name. This is an unscrupulous type, greedy for money, consented to work because of money, a very cunning swindler. … Therefore it is difficult to guarantee the fulfillment of the planned program even in the part which he proposed to us himself.”

The Soviets apparently didn’t buy Dickstein’s claim that the money was solely for his investigators and “he demands nothing for himself” because of his ideological affinity with the USSR.

Dickstein’s undercover career suffered a near fatal blow when he was not only prevented from chairing the new committee—that honor would go to Democrat Martin Dies Jr., a dull clod from Texas who had turned against the New Deal—but he was also not even named as a member, apparently because his reputation had grown so noxious. Further, the reference to Nazism was stricken from what was now titled, more generally, the Special Committee to Investigate Un-American Activities and Propaganda. While a handful of the Dies Committee hearings over the next few years focused on domestic Nazis, most were devoted to proving that the Roosevelt administration was an agent of the Communist agenda. Not atypical was the time Alabama Rep. Joe Starnes asked a witness involved in the Works Progress Administration’s Federal Theater Project about the Elizabethan playwright she had cited in her writings. “You are quoting from this Marlowe. Is he a Communist?” She responded, “Put it in the record that he was the greatest dramatist in the period immediately preceding Shakespeare.” HUAC was well on its way to becoming the exclusively Communist-exposing body that would become a standing committee following World War II and continue its ignominious run until 1975.

Even without a seat on the panel, Dickstein sought to prove his worth as a Soviet spy. He continued to produce materials on U.S.-based fascists and, in at least one instance, a Soviet defector whom Moscow was eager to have silenced. (Walter Krivitsky was found dead in a Washington, D.C., hotel room of an apparent, although not certain, suicide.) Dickstein denounced the Dies Committee at NKVD request (“a Red-baiting excursion”) and gave speeches in Congress on Moscow-dictated themes. He handed over “materials on the war budget for 1940, records of conferences of the budget subcommission, reports of the war minister, chief of staff and etc.,” according to an NKVD report.

But the money disputes continued. Dickstein admitted to the Soviets that he had formerly worked for Polish and British intelligence—another stunning revelation—both of which, he said, “paid money without any questions.” Finally, in February 1940, the NKVD decided to cut him loose because he “can’t be a useful organizer who could gather around him a group of liberal congressman to exercise our influence and, alone, he doesn’t represent any interest.” According to Weinstein and Vassiliev, Dickstein had earned a total of $12,000 during his time on the Soviet payroll, about $200,000 when adjusted for inflation.

For the rest of his life, as far as anyone knew, Samuel Dickstein was a loyal American who served devotedly in government service. As a state Supreme Court justice in New York, he ruled in favor of a ballroom owner who refused to rent his space for a concert by the leftist performer Paul Robeson, upholding the argument that the facility would “be used in the furtherance of the propaganda of a nation actively hostile to the United States.” In another case, Dickstein demanded that the Soviet consul general in New York appear in court with a Russian citizen who was being forcibly prevented by consular officials from defecting to the United States. “I will compel him to obey,” Dickstein said. “I am not going to let him ignore the law.” The demand was rendered moot when the Russian woman jumped out the consulate window to her freedom.

Dickstein was never mentioned during the Red Scare years of the early 1950s, when Joe McCarthy made headlines with his famous declaration that he possessed a list of Communists working in the State Department (“I have in my hand”) that variously included 205, 57, 81 and 4 names. When he died in 1954, Dickstein was honored in much the same way as any other pol in the Democratic machine. The new Samuel Dickstein Plaza was located close to Ahearn Park, named for Dickstein’s Tammany mentor, John F. Ahearn. Even the publication of The Haunted Wood in 1999 didn’t seem to garner much local concern.

Last year, an article in the New York Times by urban affairs correspondent Sam Roberts (“A Soviet Spy in Congress Still has His Street”) inspired Susan LaRosa of the Henry Street Settlement, a social service agency, to launch a campaign that she had already been thinking about starting. So far, she has collected from 300 to 400 signatures on a petition proposing to replace Samuel Dickstein’s name with that of Lillian Wald, the nurse and humanitarian who founded the settlement in 1893 and whose devotion to the neighborhood’s residents has never been questioned. But LaRosa admitted that the procedure for such a change is labyrinthine and time-consuming. She joked that it might take 10 or 15 years to collect the signatures of 75 percent of the residents in the high-rise buildings surrounding the plaza, a city requirement.

A clamor is not apparent in the streets. “Never heard of the guy,” said a middle-aged Orthodox Jewish gentleman who was standing with a friend near one of the Dickstein Plaza street signs on a recent morning. “And I’ve lived here my whole life.”

The man, who would only give his name as Joe, said he knew nothing of Dickstein or his espionage exploits. Once he was told about the contents of the KGB files, he considered the matter for a moment. “It’s not gonna change my life but if it was proven he was a spy,” he said, “I’d have the sign removed.”