John Herrmann
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| John Theodore Herrmann | |
| Born | January 1, 1900 Lansing, Michigan |
|---|---|
| Died | April 1, 1959 (aged 48) Mexico |
| Spouse | Josephine Herbst |
John Theodore Herrmann was the person who introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss.
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[edit] Biography
He was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1900. He lived in Paris in the 1920s, as part of its famous expatriate American writers' circle, when he met his first wife, Josephine Herbst. Herbst enjoyed more success as a writer than Herrmann; the couple lived a few years in rural Pennsylvania, and were friends with Katherine Anne Porter. They divorced in the early 1930s, and he went to work for the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1934. He became part of the Ware group, a Washington D.C. based secret apparatus of the CPUSA and Comintern which supplied classified information to Soviet intelligence. Hermann worked within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.
From early 1934 until the summer of 1935, Herrmann was a paid courier for the CPUSA whose job it was to deliver material to New York emanating from the secret cells of sympathetic government employees being cultivated by Hal Ware. Herrmann introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss.[1][2]
Herrmann remarried, to Ruth Tate, and after serving during World War II in the United States Coast Guard at New Orleans, he went to Mexico and applied in March 1949 to Mexico City College as a speech and drama major. He attended for only two quarters, Fall 1950 and Winter 1951. A photograph in the Nov. 16, 1950 issue of M.C.C.'s student paper, the Collegian, shows Earl Sennett speaking to twelve students in his "Studio Stages" drama group; among them are Frank Jeffries, Alice Hartman, and John Herrmann.
The Ware group's activities were investigated in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Herrmann was placed under surveillance and questioned many times in Mexico by the FBI in connection with the HUAC inquiries, but never arrested. He died near the Pacific Ocean in April 1959, at the Hotel Navidad, in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco, Mexico from chronic alcoholism.
[edit] Books by John Herrmann
- What Happens (1928)
- Summer is Ended (1932)
- The Salesman (1939)
[edit] Notes
- ^ Elinor Langer, "The Secret Drawer," The Nation, May 30, 1994, p. 756
- ^ Elinor Langer, Josephine Herbst (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984) ISBN 978-0446328531
[edit] References
- Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (Free Press; 1994) ISBN 0-02-918730-3
