Benjamin Mandel (October 2, 1891 – August 8, 1973) "Bert Miller" was an American school teacher and communist activist who later became an ex-communist director of research for the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee (SIS).
Background
Benjamin Mandel was born in on October 2, 1891, in New York City.
Career
Mandel became a New York City schoolteacher and then organization secretary for the New York district of the Teachers Union.
Bert Miller
Communist Party of the USA (CPUSA)
Mandel used the name "Bert Miller" when he joined the Communist Party in the 1920s. On April 6, 1923, name appears in the letterhead of the 1922 Labor Defense Council in support of Bridgman Raid defendants (and forerunner of International Labor Defense or ILD) as a local committee member. Other members included Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Freda Kirchwey, Eugene V. Debs, Norman Thomas, Mary Heaton Vorse, J.B. Matthews, and Nerma Berman (wife of Soviet spy Isaiah Oggins).
In 1925 he resigned his position as a teacher to work full-time for the Party. Whittaker Chambers remembered that "Bert Miller" signed his Party card in 1925.
In 1925–26, Bert Miller studied under Professor Scott Nearing in his Research Study Group for a forthcoming book called The Law of Social Revolution (1926). Classmates included Whittaker Chambers, Dale Zysman (vice president of the Teachers' Union), Bertram Wolfe, Ben Davidson (later co-founder of the Liberal Party of New York) and his wife Eve Dorf, Sam Krieger, Alfred J. Brooks, Myra Page, and Rachel Ragozin.
In 1926, Bert Miller ignited the 1926 Passaic textile strike, as related by Benjamin Gitlow in his 1939 memoir: The man who started the ball rolling was Bert Miller, industrial organizer of District Two of the Party, which then included most of industrial New Jersey and Connecticut as well as New York City. Comrade Miller called to my attention the fact that the Botany Mills of Passaic had announced a wage cut of ten percent, beginning with October, 1925. I immediately instructed Miller to get in touch with our New Jersey comrades and explore the matter further, agreeing with him that on its face the situation seemed favorable enough for initiating agitation for a strike in retaliation for the wage cut. Miller was a veteran of the Party since its underground days and carried out his assignment expeditiously. His report convinced me that there was ample ground for developing a successful strike. Albert Weisbord, main leader of the Passaic strike, recalled later and critically of both Miller ("the innocent") and the Communist Party: In New York I contacted Bert Miller, a teacher made suddenly "industrial" organizer of the Party, who, as a newcomer in the office, tried to live up to a job he knew very little about... I was just now, in 1924, that ignorant, unsuspicious me had to enter into that nest of intrigue, without the lightest inkling of the kind of leadership under which I was enlisting... I soon found the approximately 400 strikers in meeting in a small hall near the mill... We built up a picket line, drew up our demands and created a semblance of organization. They no longer felt lost or abandoned... They wanted to see membership applications and membership dues books... Back in New York I reported all this to Miller. This innocent agreed that I should get application and membership cards printed. He was not aware that on this matter he would be bitterly assailed by the Foster-Cannon leadership for dual unionism and would open up a major struggle with the Party... The worthlessness of the C.P. leaders did not in the least make me undervalue the great worth of the tens of thousands of devoted foreign-born workers and militant American-born youth who were the members and followers of that party... At the moment for me the important link in the chain was the innocent Bert Miller, acting on this own while the "bigs" were tied up with other matters, especially the N.Y. District Organizer Weinstone who was very busy intriguing with Cannon on how to form a new faction to end factions! Weinstone’s sloth and Miller’s ignorance were to help me much. In 1926, Bert Miller also became business manager of the Daily Worker communist newspaper. His name first appears on the masthead in the November 26, 1926 issue, and appeared throughout 1926 and 1927 – the publication of "business manager" dropped from the masthead in 1928. Whittaker Chambers recalled: In those days, Bert Miller was a harassed soul. As business manager of the Daily Worker, the future research director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities had to meet a weekly payroll and find money to pay the paper, print, and other bills. Money was very hard to find, and his life was a weekly crisis. Thus, my chief recollection of Bert Miller from the past is less than a face than as a weary plaint: money. Bert suffered other grievances, too. In his business office, he presided over a number of young women Communists, one of whom was a remarkably pretty Hungarian girl. He often protested that his girls were terrified towalk through the Daily Worker office (as they sometimes had to) because, while they wriggled their way past he crowded chairs, each of the editors in turn reached back and pinched them. In 1927, Mandel was elected to the Party's Central Committee at its fifth congress in 1927. In 1929, he was re-elected as a "candidate member" at its sixth convention in March 1929. Later that year, he was expelled with followers of Jay Lovestone (known at the Lovestoneites) as an "incurable right-wing deviationist".
Communist Party (Opposition) (CPO)
As of the first issue (November 1, 1929), Bert Miller appeared on the editorial board of Revolutionary Age, organ of the Communist Party (Majority) formed by Jay Lovestone, i.e., he joined Lovestone's Communist Party (Majority Group). Other editors included: Benjamin Gitlow, editor; Bertram Wolfe, associate editor; and editorial board members J.O. Bixby, Ellen Dawson, Will Herberg, William Miller, R. Pires, Jack Rubinstein, Frank Vrataric, Ed Welsh, W.J. White, Herbert Zam, and Charles S. Zimmerman.
Miller was also one of the original teachers at the New Workers School of the Lovestoneites, as advertised in the November 15 issue and detailed in a December 15 article.
In April 1930, Miller spoke in Philadelphia to some 300 workers regarding "The Crisis in the Communist Party of the USA."
During 1930, Miller joined the Conference for Progressive Labor Action.
In June 1931, the Communist League of Struggle (Adhering to the International Left Opposition), attached Miller as a Lovestone leader: Do you think that it is an accident that out of your ranks, trained by Lovestone, have sprung OPEN RENEGADES from Communism, Bert Miller and Company? Can you not see that Bert Miller but does what Lovestone is planning to do -- later, that Miller is but the vanguard of Lovestone himself? ... In spite of intrigue on the part of the official Communist Party, the Lovestone group and its allies, Bert Miller and Ludwig Lore -- about 250 attended the Albert Weisbord-Louis F. Budenz debate at the Labor Temple, Saturday, May 2. The topic was "Shall the Workers Support the Conference for Progressive Labor Action in Preference to the Communists?"... After the posters, leaflets and advertisements announcing the debate were released, pressure to kill the debate opened. According to reports, William Z. Foster who was scheduled to debate Muste a week later, threatened to withdraw if Muste debated Weisbord first. Under the Party's pressure, Muste decided not to debate Weisbord and assigned Budenz in his stead. This was the time for Miller, the "communist" watch-dog and advisor to the C.P.L.A. to step in with his "expert" advice. Lore also advised Budenz not to go through with the arrangements. By August 1931, the Lovestoneites were commenting angrily in Revolutionary Age: "As soon as this group of comrades entered the CPLAConference for Progressive Labor Action and began to function, a differentiation began to take place: Bert Miller, Levich, and Lawrence began to move rapidly to the extreme right, while the rest of the comrades under the leadership of Comrade Benjamin, took up a sharp struggle against social reformism and against Miller and his friends as well." Miller's push for this group caused Benjamin Gitlow to split with the Lovestoneites, who insisted that "Stalin's policies were a hundred percent correct."
By October 1931, Revolutionary Age was calling Miller, Gitlow, and others "traitors": ON WORKERS SOLIDARITY A fine day of celebration for these traitors, who, together with Gitlow, Budenz, Bert Miller and Zimmerman and the smaller fry of Lovestone renegades, are trying to break the strike of the textile workers. Labor Day is a day that symbolizes the attempted sell-out of their militant struggles. It is a day of hatred of the system that makes use of such scum from Green, Woll to Gitlow, Budenz, Muste and the smaller gang of pickpockets, who pose as "labor leaders." August 22, 1931, I. Amter In 1931, Miller's name appeared as a national officer of the Joint Committee on Unemployment, headed by John Dewey. On November 19, 1931, "Benjamin Mandel" attended a protest against Italian foreign minister Dino Grandi, a "Fascist diplomat": as part of deputation from the Committee for International Anti-Fascist Protest, Mandel joined A.J. Muste, Roger Baldwin, and several Italian-Americans. On December 2, 1931, "Benjamin Mandel" as "organizer for the Brotherhood of Brooklyn Edison Employees" as well as observer for the Conference for Progressive Labor Action, joined a group of nine led by Rev. Eliot White, formerly of the Grace Episcopal Church, to distribute union literature, when they found themselves attacked by hundreds of people. In its December 1931 issue, Labor Age described Mandel as "labor organizer and writer... active in the White Plains Road Laborers Strike last summer... now helping the Brooklyn Edison Employes organization campaign."
In 1932, Mandel had called for a bar to admittance of communists during a meeting to discuss the ongoing Harlan County coal strike that had started in 1931 (see Harlan County War): "No communists are admitted here", was the greeting at the door, which met the delegate of the C.L.S., who tried to attend the "broad united front of labor", called by the I.W.W. General Defense Committee for the Harlan Kentucky miners on January 6. Of course it had to be the unspeakable Bert Miller, who handed out this information. All sorts of liberals, anarchists, and what not were gathered together, but the Communists were not even allowed to enter the hall!" On March 6, 1932, Mandel joined a committee that supported the $375 million Costigan-La Follettee-Lewis relief bill, itself part of a $3 billion federal bill to provide housing credit, end sales taxes, and increases surtaxes and estate taxes.
Benjamin Mandel
On July 17, 1932, a new joint committee on unemployment in New York state formed under Bishop Francis J. McConnell of the Methodist Baptist Church in Manhattan. Committee members included: Sidney E. Goldstein, Stephen S. Wise, Mary Fox, Alfred Bernheim, Darwin J. Meserole, Howard Y. Williams, A.J. Muste, J.B. Matthews, William Spofford, Winifred Chappell, Abraham Lefkowitz, Sidney Hillman, Paul Blanshard, Jack Altman, Helen Alfred, Walter White, and LeRoy E. Bowman.
Dies Committee and Rapp Coudert By the later 1930s, Bert Miller the former communist had become a dedicated anti-communist. His ideological change was partly inspired by an opposition to Stalinism and also partly by a distaste for factionalism and internecine squabbles in the American communist movement.