I’m back in FOIA hell.
Some time in the last decade, the FBI began methodically transferring the dead case files of dead Communists to the National Archives and Records Administration. This is a disaster for scholarship on American Communism. If the FBI retains a file, they quickly review it to redact the names of agents and spies and then email you a pdf at no cost to you. If NARA possesses the file, they put you in a ridiculously long queue to meticulously review the file. Years later they’ll tell you that you can get a pdf copy of the file for 80 cents a page (there are often hundreds if not thousands of pages). In the alternative, you can absurdly travel to College Park, MD to view the files on one of their computers and email it to yourself! I’m lucky that I began researching We Always Had a Union in 2006, but I regret that many of the names that I encountered during my research are in the dreaded “third tier of processing” with a decade-long backlog.
Worse, both NARA and the FBI now frequently claim that no record exists, when it clearly does because of the subject’s notoriety and because someone else has fucking cited the released, redacted file!!!
I’ve been chasing Ludwig Lore’s file for over four years. Lore was a founding member of the Communist Party, and a key member/supporter of the Amalgamated Food Workers union (among many other roles in his fascinating life). To the extent that his name is remembered, it’s as the Party’s first coded heresy–”Loreism”–a 1925 stand-in for Trotskyism before the Russians were ready to let the world know that Trotsky was being sidelined. The controversy roiled the Amalgamated, pushing one breakaway faction towards the AFL and gangster domination. I’m convinced that I found Lore in Michael J. Obermeier’s FBI file, as a Confidential National Defense Informant warning in 1942 that the volunteer German-American Labor Committee was a plot to determine the repatriate Soviet-allied German exiles to post-war Germany. I’d love more confirmation, but the FBI claims they shipped his file off to NARA (after initially claiming to not recognize the name) and NARA found only two files related to Lore (neither his actual file, 65-NY-14920).
His grandson got his hands on Lore’s file, and wound up writing a book on him, Firebrand: Journalist Ludwig Lore’s Lifelong Struggle Against Capitalism, Stalinism and the Rise of Nazism. Unfortunately, David Lore passed away shortly after self-publishing this piece of family genealogical history that, as a retired investigative reporter, wisely realized might be of interests to scholars of early American Communist and anti-fascist history. The younger Lore didn’t quite get as neck-deep into the twists and turns of the Comintern and the different Party lines as to truly make sense of his grandfather’s complicated political life, but he did get the impression that, while serving as an international correspondent for the New York Post newspaper (back when it was liberal!) Ludwig Lore was not only an informant for the US government, but he may have been a double agent for the Soviets.
I recently double-checked on my outstanding FOIA request to NARA for Lore’s file and found that they administratively closed it three years ago. So, I did a deeper Google search to see if someone else had acquired the file and posted it to archive.org or governmentattic.org. I found Svetlana Chervonnaya’s DocumentsTalk website. Chervonnaya is a Russian scholar of (among other things) Soviet espionage. She acquired Lore’s FBI file from Jeff Kisseloff, who’s written about the Alger Hiss case (yes, there’s a Lore connection; Whittacker Chambers was a regular visitor to the Lore home).
Chervonnaya cross-checked Lore’s FBI file with a book on Soviet espionage byJohn Earl Haynes and Harvey Klehr and concluded that one spy, coded “Leo,” was actually Ludwig Lore. This is fascinating, if true. It doesn’t make sense on the surface, but on a deeper level it’s a total a-ha moment. When Lore was excommunicated from the Communist Party of the United States, he was burned. He was a renegade, an enemy, ostracised and criticised. The Daily Worker never stopped denouncing him for the last two decades of his life. This would have made for an excellent cover for becoming a spy for the Soviets, along with Lore’s continued desire to be of use to the world Communist movement. One development that coincided with the 1925 “Loreism” controversy is that the Soviets tightened up their spy operation. From 1919-1925, Communist activists who got involved in the Comintern might also be involved in cloak-and-dagger espionage. After 1925, there was a hard line. Americans engaged in political activity, and were left in the dark about Soviet espionage. A Party activist who wanted to aid the movement as a spy would essentially renounce their US citizenship. They’d quit the Party, change their name and break all contact with their American comrades. They’d become members of the Russian party, and subject to its discipline.
Lore didn’t do that. He retained his public identity as a newspaper columnist and public speaker. It seems that he just gathered and passed on useful information. Was Lore a double agent? I’d like to find out. Again, it’s pretty clear to me that he did become a Confidential National Defense Informant for the US. His name is redacted, but he makes too much sense as the source of one particular report (issued only a few months before he died). It’s possible he did both at the same time. It’s also quite likely that, as a member of the Jewish diaspora who’s been raising alarms about the rise of Naziism since at least 1932 that he was appalled by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and immediately broke ties with the Communists and decided to work with whoever was most credibly going to try to stop the Nazis.
Now I’m thinking about writing a book about a handful of prominent early Communists (James P. Cannon, Max Shachtman, Jay Lovestone, Benjamin Gitlow and Ludwig Lore) who spent the 1930’s trying to get the Communist International to over-rule the Russian party (i.e. Stalin) and reorient the worldwide Communist movement back to the vision that they signed up for in 1919. These five men, of course, go on to have remarkably bizarre influence on the course of history (in their own ways).
(If this sounds like I’ve abandoned the previous project I mentioned, that’s not entirely the case, but I am feeling very meh about my first chapter draft and feel like I should have more than one project going to keep me sane.)
And, so, I continue to research. One additional, fascinating tidbit I came across. Looking into Ben Gitlow’s papers, some of which are deposited at the University of North Carolina, I checked for Lore’s name in correspondence files from the 1930’s. Now, Gitlow was particularly harsh about turning on Lore in 1925. “We were pretty mean and heartless about Lore,” he confessed years later. “But at the time we did not even question the ethics of hounding an innocent scapegoat at the behest of the Comintern leaders,” he wrote in 1939.
The Gitlow archive has one letter from Lore, dated October 1, 1937:
Dear Comrade Gitlow,
Would you be kind enough to mimeograph 300 “Lecture Subjects” as included, at your earliest convenience.
Thanks, greetings,
Ludwig Lore
Fascinating, if not terribly illuminating. A week ago, I would have assumed neither man ever spoke to each other after 1925. Now, I wonder if Gitlow tried to recruit him to any of his own external oppositionist movements. Or if Cannon, Shachtman or Lovestone did the same. If Trotsky shared any opinions about Lore’s value to the Trotskyist movement. And how much of Lore’s contact with his erstwhile comrades was in order to helpt the Soviets keep tabs on their activities.
I’ll be fascinated to continue this research.