Nathaniel Weyl: Encounters With Communism

[Tim Carroll]

Tim, as I am sure you know, many of the most dedicated anti-communists were former communuists, e.g. Whittaker Chambers.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Historically, didn't some of those affiliations have something to do with one of those pesky timeframes I'm always ranting about - such as the Great Depression? Antistructural history is processual.

Tim Carroll

[Pat Speer]

Mr. Weyl, I hope that you see this. I was just looking through some of the documents included in Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked, and noticed that John Martino's widow said you had taped recollections of both her husband and William Pawley. Any chance you can make those transcripts available?

[Nathaniel Weyl]

Mr. Weyl, I hope that you see this.  I was just looking through some of the documents included in Larry Hancock's Someone Would Have Talked, and noticed that John Martino's widow said you had taped recollections of both her husband and William Pawley.  Any chance you can make those transcripts available?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

This response is my best memory of long forgotten events. I believe that the way I WAS CASTRO'S PRISONER was written was for JM to come to my house and relate what he recalled of his prison ordeal in my presence and on tape and also to send me taped or typed manuscript for editing. I didn't keep any of this material.

A year or so later, Bill Pawley asked me to help him throw together material for his bio. I would come down to his office and spend mornings with him on the job with full access to his files, but have no memory of anything being taped. This project, for reasons I have forgotten, didn't fly and Pawley wisely put someone else to the task.

[Pat Speer]

Mr. Weyl, thank you for your response. If you should come across anything relating to your contacts with Mr. Pawley and Mr.Martino, notes or tapes, anything, it would be of the utmost interest to the many historians of that period. It's safe to say there would be no shortage of volunteers should you ask for help cleaning out your garage.

[Tim Gratz]

From the May 8, 2005 "New York Times":

Nathaniel Weyl, a writer and economist who was best known for the minor role he played in the Alger Hiss spy case, died on April 13 at his home in Ojai, Calif. He was 94.

Mr. Weyl died of natural causes, said his stepdaughter Georgianne Cowan.

One of a type of midcentury American intellectual who repudiated youthful communist affiliation and tilted toward conservative thought, Mr. Weyl wrote several books, and two of them, "Treason" (1950) and "Red Star Over Cuba (1960), aroused critical interest and set off discussion in their times.

But it was his admission that he had been a communist in the 1930's, and a member of the so-called Ware Group along with Hiss, that earned Mr. Weyl a measure of notoriety. Mr. Weyl (pronounced "while") had been active in leftist student groups while he was an undergraduate at Columbia College. He left academic life for Washington in 1933 and joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, where he was recruited into a communist cell that, he would later testify, included Hiss.

In 1952, a Time magazine reporter watched at a Senate subcommittee meeting as Mr. Weyl, "a deliberate, conservative witness," who "dragged deeply on cigarette after cigarette," testified how he had seen Hiss at more than two meetings of the communist cell.

Mr. Weyl's testimony added weight to the charges already brought against Hiss by Whittaker Chambers, who had accused him of espionage.

Hiss, a former State Department official, was convicted of perjury in 1950 and served 44 months in prison.

According to Ms. Cowan, in later life Mr. Weyl moderated his conservative views, and voted for Bill Clinton and John Kerry.

Nathaniel Weyl was born on July 20, 1910, in New York City, the only child of Walter Edward Weyl, a founder of The New Republic and a prominent progressive, and Bertha Poole Weyl.

He received a bachelor's degree from Columbia College in 1931 and did some postgraduate work at the London School of Economics and at Columbia University. He spent two years overseas in the Army in World War II.

In addition to Ms. Cowan, of Los Angeles, Mr. Weyl is survived by his twin sons, Walter and Jonathan, both of Florida; and another stepdaughter, Jeanne Cowan of Boston.

[Guest John Gillespie]

Greg,

As a Jazz afficionado, I like to think of it as "the sound track" of the era, though there is noise not of our making.

Regards,

John G