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Washing machine repairman accused of plotting Red-baiting senator's death

Sunday, May 11, 2003

By Milan Simonich, Post-Gazette Staff Writer

Louis Bortz, a communist and washing machine repairman with roots in Beechview, died in August at age 92. No reporter wrote so much as a paragraph about his passing.

	Related article: Private hearings not so private

The quiet surrounding Bortz's death contrasted mightily with his life. A half-century ago, his name filled the newspapers after he was called to testify before Sen. Joseph McCarthy's committee investigating people who were suspected of being anti-American.

The FBI had branded Bortz as a communist subversive and a would-be assassin whose intent was to "liquidate" McCarthy himself. Neither was true and Bortz was never charged, but the allegations stuck to like glue during the '50s.

Bortz's long-forgotten name surfaced again last week when the Senate unsealed 4,500 pages of transcripts from McCarthy's private hearings. Bortz and other witnesses with connections to Pittsburgh account for several hundred pages of the documents, which were made public to mark the 50th anniversary of the hearings.

In the icy days of the Cold War, McCarthy contended that communists were undermining America's military and government operations, and even its television shows and radio broadcasts. A Wisconsin Republican, McCarthy used his Subcommittee on Investigations to hound witnesses, many of whom were tarred by innuendo but not by evidence.

Bortz was just such a man. McCarthy's committee did little investigating of his background, relying instead on a single informant. When the informant turned out to be a liar, the allegations he made against Bortz and other Western Pennsylvanians began to collapse, though not before lives and reputations were ruined.

A handful of those called into McCarthy's executive sessions were big names, such as poet Langston Hughes, composer Aaron Copland and New York Times reporter James Reston. But most were like Bortz, ordinary citizens accused of being communists bent on overthrowing the government.

Bortz testified for two days in June 1953, first in a closed session, later in public. Then 42, Bortz arrived in Washington to answer a hastily issued subpoena from McCarthy.

Bortz had no lawyer, and he immediately asked for a postponement so he could hire one. McCarthy said Bortz would be given time to obtain legal representation, then ignored his own ruling by plunging ahead with the hearing.

McCarthy and the committee's chief counsel, Roy Cohn, hurled hundreds of questions and accusations at Bortz, who underwent a full day of interrogation without an attorney. Bortz chose not to answer most questions by invoking his Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.

Enraged, McCarthy threatened Bortz with contempt of Congress a dozen times.

McCarthy regularly advised witnesses that they had a right not to answer a question if they thought it might incriminate them, but he took each refusal to answer as an admission of guilt, then browbeat the witness over his silence.

Named by a snitch

Bortz landed in front of McCarthy's committee because of a portly snitch named Joseph Mazzei. Mazzei ran a theater in Millvale, but he skipped the movies many nights so he could pose as a communist and gather information to pass on to the FBI.

Many people in Western Pennsylvania -- including blacks, Jews and unionists and others who felt the sting of discrimination -- had considered converting to communism during the 1930s and '40s. These people became Mazzei's fodder.

In his undercover work, Mazzei sat through organizing all over the city and suburbs and tried to strike up friendships. He told the FBI he knew all the communists in Pittsburgh. Mazzei gave their names to the bureau. Often, he also claimed that people he had identified as communists were plotting violence.

Mazzei's testimony helped lead to the conviction in 1953 of five Pittsburgh communists -- Steve Nelson, Benjamin Careathers, James Dolsen, William Albertson, and Irvin Weismann -- who were accused as subversives. McCarthy considered him an invaluable witness, especially when Mazzei proclaimed that Bortz had agreed during a communist meeting in December 1952 to assassinate the senator.

For his part, Bortz said he had never advocated or participated in violence against his country. In the 1930s, he had fought with American volunteers -- many of them communists -- against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War. He also served in the Army Air Forces during World War II.

In the hearings, McCarthy did not explore Bortz's background. Instead, he focused on Mazzei's claim that Bortz was a communist plotting an assassination. McCarthy threatened Bortz with charges of perjury and contempt of Congress for refusing to answer his questions about whether he was violent.

But after the hearings ended, McCarthy seemed to regard Bortz as nothing more than a flake. The senator told reporters that Bortz did not appear to be a menace who would kill a noted politician. Rather, McCarthy denigrated Bortz as an oddball who craved attention. McCarthy often faced the same charge himself.

On the other hand, McCarthy had warm feelings for Mazzei and the undercover work he did. What McCarthy did not know was that Mazzei's reports to the FBI were laced with untruths. By the middle-1950s, even the U.S. government was calling Mazzei a liar.

Federal investigators found that he lied about an arrest and conviction in his past, about whether the FBI had arranged for him to infiltrate the Army, and about how much the bureau had paid him. In 1956, the U.S. solicitor general said Mazzei's statements contained piles of untruths that might have been caused by "a psychiatric condition."

The following year, the U.S. Supreme Court ordered a new trial for the five Pittsburgh men convicted of being dangerous communists, saying Mazzei's testimony had been "wholly discredited."

Mazzei fell from public grace and the public eye. He died in 2000.

Langston Hughes under oath

In history books, McCarthy takes most of the blame for his committee's shoddy research and mistreatment of citizens. But the newly released transcripts show that he received plenty of help in roughing up witnesses from Republican Sen. Everett Dirksen of Illinois.

It was Dirksen who badgered poet Langston Hughes over whether his writings proved him to be a disloyal American.

"We have encountered quite a number of your works," Dirksen said to Hughes, "and I would be less than frank with you, sir, if I did not say that there is a question in the minds of the committee, and in the minds of a good many people, concerning the general objective of some of those poems, and whether they strike a communist, rather than an anticommunist note."

Hughes, who was black, told the committee he was not a communist. But he freely admitted studying communism as an ideology because of all the racism he had faced in America, starting when he was in first grade in 1907.

Hughes was the only black child in a school in Topeka, Kan. The white children followed him after the first day of classes and pelted him with stones. Finally, one boy stepped in to rescue Hughes. He told the committee he never forgot that act of friendship, but that racism had continued to mar his life.

Hughes began his college career as an Ivy Leaguer, at Columbia University in New York City. He found the bigotry so intense that he was barred from school functions. So Hughes transferred to Lincoln University, an all-black school in Chester County, where he began to blossom as a writer.

McCarthy and Cohn hated when witnesses refused to answer questions. Hughes presented the committee with the opposite problem. He answered every question in vivid detail, but the committee wanted to hear nothing about the racist society that he said had shaped his writings.

Cohn complained that Hughes was taking too much time with his answers.

Hughes had a terse reply: "I would much rather preserve my reputation and freedom than save time."

He offered to come back for a second day of testimony so he could fully explain himself and his works. The committee sent him away. Before he left, Hughes asked for his expense money -- about $9 -- for appearing.

The hunter falls

McCarthy's committee was even rougher on another writer, Fernand Auberjonois. In 1953, Auberjonois was special assistant to the director of Voice of America radio, meaning he worked for the federal government.

Auberjonois, who in later years would become the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette's correspondent in Europe, faced an angry inquisition over radio programming in France and whether it put America in the best possible light.

McCarthy asked why he had funneled programming contracts to the actor John Houseman, who had produced shows featuring Charlie Chaplin and other "left-wingers."

The committee also suggested that Auberjonois might have given work to Houseman as a payback for personal favors. Houseman's company, Media Productions, had purchased three scripts from Auberjonois' wife for a total of $750.

Auberjonois was quizzed about whether he hired artists who were exporting anti-American programs to Europe. Unlike Hughes, who worked for himself, Auberjonois was a government employee. McCarthy said he expected propaganda that would make America look good, not programs done by the likes of Chaplin and Houseman.

By December 1954, McCarthy was feeling the same kind of pressure that he had applied to Auberjonois and so many other witnesses. Fellow senators censured him for conduct unbecoming his office.

McCarthy died in 1957 of hepatitis. He was 48, younger than many of those he had interrogated. A heavy drinker, he had aggravated the disease. His alcoholism, like many of his other excesses, had been ignored by the press.

His legacy today is mostly the term McCarthyism -- a catchall for government inquisitions.

Milan Simonich can be reached at msimonich@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1956.