Herbert Philbrick

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The neutrality of this article is disputed.
Please see the discussion on the talk page.

Herbert Arthur Philbrick (May 11, 1915 - August 16, 1993) was a Boston area advertising executive who, acting as a citizen volunteer, successfully infiltrated the Communist Party USA between 1940 and 1949. His involvement began when he joined a Communist front group in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the Cambridge Youth Council. His suspicions aroused by the strange power structure and positions taken by this group, Philbrick contacted the FBI and encouraged by them, began deepening his involvement in Communist activities, joining first the Young Communist League and later, as a secret member, the Communist Party itself.

Philbrick was used by the Party for his advertising skills. Another asset was his public role as a Baptist youth leader. After time spent in local party cells in Wakefield and Malden, Massachusetts. He received training in the fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism and worked for the Party in a variety of front groups. Later he was removed from local party work and assigned to a cell of professionals where his main work consisted of working on the Progressive Party campaign of former vice-president Henry A. Wallace

Important events which affected the Communist Party during Philbrick's tenure included the United Front, The Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, Browderism and its end occasioned by the Duclos letter, and the 1948 campaign of Henry Wallace under the 3rd party Progressive Party campaign.

While Philbrick was in the Party, Earl Browder, its General Secretary, enthusiastic about wartime cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union and looking forward hopefully to postwar cooperation and the growing acceptance of the Communist party by the American public dissolved the Communist Party and reconstituted it as the Communist Political Association, apparently intending to set the Party on a reformist course. Philbrick himself made a brief show of opposing this new policy, a masterstroke, as the policy was also opposed by William Z. Foster, longtime Chairman of the Communist Party. It was not much later when in July, 1945, as a result of the Duclos letter, a letter by a leading French Communist which actually was a policy directive which originated in Moscow, the Party turned away from Browderism and again took a Marxist-Leninist line while not completely abandoning the tactics of the United Front.

Philbrick's Party career came to its end when the Justice Department decided to use him as a witness in the Smith Act prosecutions of the leadership of the Communist Party, United States v. Foster, et. al. On April 6, 1949 he was called as a witness, testifing about his career and training as a Party activist. His testimony was perhaps most useful in that he demonstrated from the content of the training he had received the intent of the Communist Party to overthrow the government of the United States.

He went on to write a biographical book, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, 'Communist', Counterspy, which was made into a movie. A television series, I Led Three Lives, loosely based on his experiences ran for 3 years during the 1950s.

Later in life, Philbrick retired to the home of his youth, in the seacoast region of New Hampshire. He remained active in giving speeches and encouraging youth and adult citizens to exercise their political rights and power, admonishing his listeners to be ever-watchful against those who would undermine our democratic form of government. Toward the end of his life, he owned and ran a hardware store in North Hampton, NH. Shunning fame, he confided that he never stopped travelling under assumed names and watching for people following him.

Herb Philbrick rarely discussed his time with the FBI and the Communist Party; his response to those who asked: "Read the book."

[edit] Further reading

Herbert Arthur Philbrick, I Led Three Lives: Citizen, 'Communist', Counterspy, Revised edition, The Capitol Hill Press, 1973, hardcover, ISBN 0-88221-003-3. First published in 1952 by McGraw Hill, reprinted by Grosset & Dunlap. Look for earlier editions on ABE