Why Donald Ogden Stewart was Blacklisted.

In 1942 Donald Ogden Stewart began working with I. A. R. Wylie, who had just published a novel entitled, Keeper of the Flame, that had been inspired by the activities of Charles Lindbergh and the America First Committee. Stewart later recalled: "The Keeper of the Flame was perfectly made for my desire to contribute to an understanding of democracy's war by exposing the danger of un-Americanism within our own gates. The story begins with the five-star funeral in a small town of one of America's favorite sons, someone like, say, General MacArthur. Spencer Tracy is a New York reporter who has been sent to cover the event and attempts in vain to obtain an interview with the widow (played by Katharine Hepburn). Accidently they meet, and he becomes increasingly suspicious that the lady is not telling the true story about her husband's death. Finally he becomes convinced that in some way she was responsible (for the death of her husband)." Eventually she confesses that she had not saved her husband from the accident because "Her husband, the great national hero, had become the spearhead of a plot to overthrow the Roosevelt-like government and substitute a Mussolini-type dictatorship... The backers of this coup were a group in the extension of the power of the people a dangerous challenge to their own type of Free World. The plot had in those days strikingly believable parallels, including Hitler's successful takeover of his country with the backing of Krupp, Thiessen and other powerful Germans."



The film, Keeper of the Flame, directed by George Cukor, was screened for the Office of War Information's Bureau of Motion Pictures on 2nd December, 1942. The Bureau's chief, Lowell Mellett, was unhappy with the picture and disapproved of its anti-capitalist message. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer head Louis B. Mayer, also hated the movie, as he felt it equated wealth with fascism. Stewart claimed that Meyer "walked out in a fury" of the New York City premiere "when he discovered, apparently for the first time, when the picture was really about". Republican Party members of Congress complained about the film's left-wing message and demanded that Will H. Hays, President of the Motion Picture Production Code, establish guidelines regarding propagandization for the motion picture industry.

Stewart regarded Keeper of the Flame as "the most radical film of his that Hollywood could accept. The authors of Radical Hollywood: The Untold Story Behind America's Favorite Movies (2002) have pointed out: "Keeper of the Flame is a brilliant and badly underrated film, not only because Tracy draws out Hepburn step by step, raising her confidence in herself rather than breaking her down, but also because the familiar idea of rich and ruthless totalitarians attains here as high a statement ever made in a major film." Martha Nochimson, has argued in Screen Couple Chemistry (2002) that the film is a "truly provocative in that it was one of Hollywood's few forays into imagining the possibility of homegrown American Fascism and the crucial damage which can be done to individual rights when inhumane and tyrannical ideas sweep a society through a charismatic leader."

After the war the the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) began investigating the entertainment industry. Attention was drawn towards Keeper of the Flame and by 1950 David Ogden Stewart was blacklisted. Unable to work in Hollywood he moved to London. As a result his passport was taken away and was unable to return to the United States. He died in London on 2nd August, 1980.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAogden.htm

Journalists and the JFK assassination: A Historical Comparison

The official belief that Lee Harvey Oswald was the assassin of John F. Kennedy has been the most significant cases of miscarriages of justice since the war. However, you would not know this by the way that the country’s most significant journalists have treated the case. For example, Walter Lippmann, later admitted he thought that Kennedy had been killed as part of a conspiracy but was unwilling to write about it in his newspaper column.


I thought it might be interesting to compare the way journalists dealt with the most important miscarriage of justice before the war. This was the conviction of Bartolomeo Vanzetti and Nicola Sacco in 1920. The men were accused of killing Frederick Parmenter and Alessandro Berardelli during a robbery. Both men were foreign-born anarchists and this was the time of the Red Scare (a response to the Russian Revolution). In 1920 thousands of immigrants with left-wing views were deported from America. Vanzetti and Sacco had alibis and investigative journalists had even discovered who had really killed Parmenter and Berardelli.

The nation’s leading journalists behaved honourably in this case and demanded their release. This included Heywood Broun, Walter Lippmann (in his liberal period), John Dos Passos, Upton Sinclair, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Eugene Lyons, Freda Kirchway, Floyd Dell, etc. Significant figures in Europe also became involved including Bertrand Russell, John Galsworthy, Arnold Bennett, George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells and Anatole France.

Over the next few years there were several appeals but Vanzetti and Sacco remained on death-row. In 1927 Governor Alvan T. Fuller appointed a three-member panel of Harvard President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Samuel W. Stratton, and the novelist, Robert Grant to conduct a complete review of the case and determine if the trials were fair. This was a sort of Warren Commission.

The committee reported that no new trial was called for and based on that assessment Governor Fuller refused to delay their executions or grant clemency. Walter Lippmann, who had been one of the main campaigners for Sacco and Vanzetti, argued that Governor Fuller had "sought with every conscious effort to learn the truth" and that it was time to let the matter drop and allow the men to be executed.

Heywood Broun, the most popular columnist in America at the time, refused to let the matter drop. Broun is an interesting case. He held left-wing opinions that were not shared by any of the newspaper owners who ran his syndicated column. However, he was so popular with the public they could not afford not to include his articles.

Broun was employed by the New York World (at $30,000 a year the highest paid journalist in America). On 5th August he wrote in his column: "Alvan T. Fuller never had any intention in all his investigation but to put a new and higher polish upon the proceedings. The justice of the business was not his concern. He hoped to make it respectable. He called old men from high places to stand behind his chair so that he might seem to speak with all the authority of a high priest or a Pilate. What more can these immigrants from Italy expect? It is not every prisoner who has a President of Harvard University throw on the switch for him. And Robert Grant is not only a former Judge but one of the most popular dinner guests in Boston. If this is a lynching, at least the fish peddler and his friend the factory hand may take unction to their souls that they will die at the hands of men in dinner coats or academic gowns, according to the conventionalities required by the hour of execution."

The following day Broun returned to the attack. He argued that Governor Alvan T. Fuller had vindicated Judge Webster Thayer "of prejudice wholly upon the testimony of the record". Broun had pointed out that Fuller had "overlooked entirely the large amount of testimony from reliable witnesses that the Judge spoke bitterly of the prisoners while the trial was on." Broun added: "It is just as important to consider Thayer's mood during the proceedings as to look over the words which he uttered. Since the denial of the last appeal, Thayer has been most reticent, and has declared that it is his practice never to make public statements concerning any judicial matters which come before him. Possibly he never did make public statements, but certainly there is a mass of testimony from unimpeachable persons that he was not so careful in locker rooms and trains and club lounges."

However, it was his comments on Abbott Lawrence Lowell that caused the most controversy: "From now on, I want to know, will the institution of learning in Cambridge which once we called Harvard be known as Hangman's House?" The New York Times complained in an editorial that Broun's "educated sneer at the President of Harvard for having undertaken a great civic duty shows better than an explosion the wild and irresponsible spirit which is abroad".

Ralph Pulitzer, the owner of the New York World, decided to stop Broun writing about the case after a board meeting on 11th August. As Richard O'Connor, the author of Heywood Broun: A Biography (1975) has pointed out: "The editorial board's decision certainly was defensible if one takes into account the climate of the twenties... The country was acutely aware of what some newspapers termed the Red Menace, now that all hope that the Bolshevik dictatorship in Moscow might crumble or be overthrown had vanished."

On 12th August 1927 Pulitzer published a statement in the newspaper: "The New York World has always believed in allowing the fullest possible expression of individual opinion to those of its special writers who write under their own names. Straining its interpretation of this privilege, the New York World allowed Mr. Heywood Brown to write two articles on the Sacco-Vanzetti case, in which he expressed his personal opinion with the utmost extravagance. The New York World then instructed him, now that he had made his own position clear, to select other subjects for his next articles. Mr. Broun, however, continued to write on the Sacco-Vanzetti case. The New York World, thereupon, exercising its right of final decision as to what it will publish in its columns, has omitted all articles submitted by Mr. Broun."

Broun now went on strike and after sales of the New York World fell by over 50,000, it was agreed that he could write whatever he wanted. However, by this time, Vanzetti and Sacco, had been executed.

On 23rd August, 1977, Michael Dukakis, the Governor of Massachusetts, issued a proclamation, effectively absolving the two men of the crime. "Today is the Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti Memorial Day. The atmosphere of their trial and appeals were permeated by prejudice against foreigners and hostility toward unorthodox political views. The conduct of many of the officials involved in the case shed serious doubt on their willingness and ability to conduct the prosecution and trial fairly and impartially. Simple decency and compassion, as well as respect for truth and an enduring commitment to our nation's highest ideals, require that the fate of Sacco and Vanzetti be pondered by all who cherish tolerance, justice and human understanding."

We do not know what Heywood Broun would have said about the JFK assassination because he died of pneumonia on 18th December, 1939. However, it is highly unlikely that a newspaper would have been willing to run his column at the time.

On 22nd August, 1938, Heywood Broun was called before the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). He had been accused of being a communist and a member of communist-front pressure groups such as the National Committee to Aid the Victims of German Fascism, the National Committee for Defense of Political Prisoners, the National Tom Mooney Council of Action and the National Scottsboro Committee of Action. Broun denied being a member of the American Communist Party but agreed that he had joined groups campaigning against the conviction of Tom Mooney and the Scottsboro Boys and the imprisonment of the political opponents of Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany.

The following year he was sacked by Roy W. Howard, the owner of the New York World-Telegram, because of his support for President Franklin Roosevelt and the New Deal. As Broun had warned many years previously, once newspapers were owned by a few wealthy individuals, dissent opinion would be squashed.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAsacco.htm  

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAbrounH.htm

Victor Kravchenko

I have been interested in the discussions about the release of FBI files concerning the JFK assassination. It is possible that the unwillingness to release the files has anything to do with the assassination.


I have recently been writing about Victor Kravchenko. During the Second World War he served as a Captain in the Red Army on the Eastern Front. In 1942 Joseph Stalin had ordered all former engineers and other vital industrial experts to return to concentrate on increasing military production of armaments. After being vetted by the NKVD he was posted to the Soviet Purchasing Commission in Washington that was involved in implementing the Lend Lease agreement in the summer of 1943.


Kravchenko had been a supporter of Leon Trotsky and a close friend of Sergo Ordzhonikidze, who had been executed by Stalin in 1937. While in the US he came into contact with David Dallin, a former leader of the Mensheviks who had emigrated to the country in 1940. Dallin also introduced Kravchenko to Lilia Estrin, Isaac Don Levine, Max Eastman and Eugene Lyons. Kravchenko also had meetings with the FBI where he had conversations about the possibility of defecting from the Soviet Union.

Kravchenko told the FBI that the Washington office of Soviet Purchasing Commission was under the control of a covert NKVD team. The author of The Anti-Communist Manifestos: Four Books that Shaped the Cold War (2009) has pointed out: "All the executives of the commission were Communist Party members, though most, including Kravchenko, were under instructions to conceal that fact. The most important business was conducted in closed meetings attended only by Party members. In the typical pattern of domestic Soviet industries, there were secret police spies everywhere."

On 1st April, 1944, he sought political asylum in the United States. A few days later the New York Times reported that Kravchenko was "accusing the Soviet Government of a double-faced foreign policy with respect to its professed desire for collaboration with the United States and Great Britain and denouncing the Stalin regime for failure to grant political and civil liberties to the Russian people." The newspaper went on to add: "Mr. Kravchenko declined for patriotic reasons to discuss matters bearing on the military conduct of the war by Soviet Russia or to reveal any details bearing upon economic questions, particularly as they affect the functioning of lend-lease as handled by the Soviet Purchasing Commission and in Russia."


In 2006 Gary Woodward Kern decided to write a book about Kravchenko and discovered that most of the FBI files on him were classified on the grounds of national security. Even those they were willing to release they were heavily redacted. Kravchenko was dead but he had spoken to friends about what he told the FBI in 1943-44. This enabled Kern to discover what had been redacted. It was information about illegalities and profiteering on the part of the American contractors supplying the Soviets as part of the Lend Lease agreement. It seems that the FBI wanted to protect these companies.


Victor Kravchenko died from a gunshot wound in New York City on 25th February 1966. Officially his death was recorded as a suicide. However, his son Andrew believes he was the victim of a Soviet assassination. The released FBI files show that Lyndon B. Johnson took a strong interest in Kravchenko's suicide. He demanded that the FBI determine if his suicide note was authentic or a Soviet fabrication.
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/RUSkravechenko.htm

Joseph and Stewart Alsop and the JFK Assassination

In 1963 Joseph and Stewart Alsop syndicated column appeared in over 300 newspapers. Both these journalists had a long-term relation with the CIA.

Stewart Alsop was a member of the Special Operations Executive (SOE) before being transfered to work under Allen Dulles at the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in 1944. After the war Alsop co-wrote with Thomas Braden (later to become head of the International Organizations Division of the CIA), a history of the OSS called Sub Rosa: The O.S.S. and American Espionage (1946).

After the war Joseph and Stewart Alsop established the thrice-weekly "Matter of Fact" column for the New York Herald Tribune. Stewart concentrated on domestic politics, whereas his brother traveled the world to cover foreign affairs. In 1946 Joseph and Stewart Alsop urged militant anti-communism. They warned that "the liberal movement is now engaged in sowing the seeds of its own destruction." Liberals, they argued, "consistently avoided the great political reality of the present: the Soviet challenge to the West." Unless the country addressed this problem, "In the spasm of terror which will seize this country... it is the right - the very extreme right - which is most likely to gain victory."

The Alsops lived in Washington where they associated with a group of journalists, politicians and government officials that became known as the Georgetown Set. This included Frank Wisner, George Kennan, Dean Acheson, Richard Bissell, Desmond FitzGerald, Thomas Braden, Tracy Barnes, Philip Graham, David Bruce, Clark Clifford, Walt Rostow, Eugene Rostow, Chip Bohlen, Cord Meyer, Richard Helms, Desmond FitzGerald, Frank Wisner, James Angleton, William Averill Harriman, John McCloy, Felix Frankfurter, John Sherman Cooper, James Reston, Allen W. Dulles and Paul Nitze.

Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has pointed out: "In long exchanges, heated by intellectual passion and alcohol, their vision of a new world order began to take shape. Internationalist, abrasive, competitive, these men had an unshakeable belief in their value system, and in their duty to offer it to others. They were the patricians of the modern age, the paladins of democracy, and saw no contradiction in that. This was the elite which ran American foreign policy and shaped legislation at home. Through think-tanks to foundations, directorates to membership of gentlemen's clubs, these mandarins were interlocked by their institutional affiliations and by a shared belief in their own superiority.
In 1947 several of these figures were involved in establishing the CIA. It has been argued that the OSS provided a model for the CIA. Others have suggested that it was the British Security Coordination (BSC) that was the true forerunner. According to Joseph C. Goulden several of the "old boys" who were around for the founding of the CIA like repeating a mantra, “The Brits taught us everything we know - but by no means did they teach us everything that they know.”

According to Carl Bernstein, Joseph Alsop did important work for the CIA: "In 1953, Joseph Alsop, then one of America’s leading syndicated columnists, went to the Philippines to cover an election. He did not go because he was asked to do so by his syndicate. He did not go because he was asked to do so by the newspapers that printed his column. He went at the request of the CIA. Alsop is one of more than 400 American journalists who in the past twenty-five years have secretly carried out assignments for the Central Intelligence Agency, according to documents on file at CIA headquarters."

Evan Thomas, the author of The Very Best Men: The Early Years of the CIA (1995), argues that the Alsop brothers worked very closely with Frank Wisner, the director of the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), the espionage and counter-intelligence branch of the CIA. He points out that he "considered his friends Joe and Stewart Alsop to be reliable purveyors of the company line in their columns". In 1953 the brothers helped out Edward Lansdale and the CIA in the Philippines: "Wisner actively courted the Alsops, along with a few other newsmen he regarded as suitable outlets. When Lansdale was manipulating electoral politics in the Philippines in 1953, Wisner asked Joe Alsop to write some columns warning the Filipinos not to steal the election from Magsaysay. Alsop was happy to comply, though he doubted his columns would have much impact on the Huks. After the West German counterintelligence chief, Otto John, defected to the Soviet Union in 1954, Wisner fed Alsop a story that the West German spymaster had been kidnapped by the KGB. Alsop dutifully printed the story, which may or may not have been true."


Richard Bissell, the head of the Directorate for Plans (DPP), was also a close friend of the Alsops. He later recalled: "The Alsops were fairly discreet in what they asked, but I was not as discreet as I should have been. They could usually guess." Bissell admitted to Jonathan Lewis, who was helping him with his memoirs, that the Alsops were the only journalists who he provided with secret information. In 1955 the Alsops reported details of what had taken place in a National Security Council meeting. Allen W. Dulles was so angry that he ordered Wisner to cancel a meeting with the Alsop brothers that weekend at his farm in Maryland. On another occasion, Paul Nitze was so upset that they published the contents of a sensitive cable, that he told them, "You're not the Alsop brothers! You're the Hiss brothers!"


In 1957, during his first and only visit to the Soviet Union, Joe was entrapped by the KGB in a Moscow hotel room. According to Evan Thomas, "Alsop foolishly allowed himself to be caught in a honey trap by the KGB on a trip to Moscow in 1957. The Russians took photos of Alsop in the midst of a homosexual act with a KGB agent and tried to blackmail him into becoming an agent." Edwin Yoder has argued in his book, Joe Alsop's Cold War: A Study of Journalistic Influence and Intrigue (1995), that the existence of these photographs did not stop Alsop from continuing to denounce the Soviet Union. However, twelve years later Alsop discovered that the photographs had come into the possession of J. Edgar Hoover. It is possible that Alsop was so important to the CIA that they were able to protect him from the KGB operation.

Alsop held liberal views on domestic issues and became a supporter of John Kennedy. According to Katharine Graham, Alsop told her in 1958 that he had the potential to become president. When she stated: "Joe, surely you're not serious." He replied, "Darling, I think he will certainly be nominated and quite probably be elected." In 1960 Kennedy did win the Democratic Party nomination. Alsop now joined forces with Philip Graham to persuade Kennedy to make Lyndon Johnson, instead of Stuart Symington, his running-mate. It is claimed that Alsop commented to Kennedy: "We've come to talk to you about the vice-presidency. Something may happen to you, and Symington is far too shallow a puddle for the United States to dive into. Furthermore, what are you going to do about Lyndon Johnson? He's much too big a man to leave up in the Senate." Graham then added that not having Johnson on the ticket would certainly be trouble.

In her autobiography, Personal History (1997) Katharine Graham revealed that her husband and Alsop lobbied for President John Kennedy to appoint their friend, Douglas Dillon, as Secretary of the Treasury. Arthur Schlesinger points out in A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (1965) that the Kennedy team "were distressed by (Graham and Alsop) impassioned insistence that Douglas Dillon should and would-be made Secretary of the Treasury. Without knowing Dillon, we mistrusted him on principle as a presumed exponent of Republican economic policies."


Frances Stonor Saunders, the author of Who Paid the Piper: The CIA and the Cultural Cold War? (1999) has argued that a high-level CIA official told her that Stewart Alsop was a "CIA agent". Saunders discussed this issue with Joseph Alsop. He dismissed this claim as "absolute nonsense" but admitted that both men were very close to the agency: "I was closer to the Agency than Stew was, though Stew was very close... I dare say he did perform some tasks - he did the correct thing as an American... The Founding Fathers of the CIA were close personal friends of ours... It was a social thing. I have never received a dollar, I never signed a secrecy agreement. I didn't have to... I've done things for them when I thought they were the right thing to do. I call it doing my duty as a citizen... The CIA did not open itself at all to people it did not trust... Stew and I were trusted, and I'm proud of it."


One wonders if the CIA had any influence over the way that the Alsop brothers reported the JFK assassination.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/JFKalsop.htm


http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/NDstewart_alsop.htm

Chris Huhne, Robert Kennedy and Henry A. Wallace

One of my friends was a political adviser to Tony Blair. He once told me that political parties use friendly journalists and other investigators to collect damaging stories about leading figures in other political parties. These are rarely used but instead are traded against each other. In this way leading politicians are protected from these stories. It also makes sure that the only damaging stories that appear are against politicians who belong to small parties without stories to barter or mavericks in the major parties who are not being protected.

We now know that LBJ worked with J. Edgar Hoover to collect information about other politicians. Is it possible that Robert Kennedy was blackmailed into silence after the assassination of JFK? If so, my guess is that it was about RFK’s involvement in the plots to kill Castro.

I was reminded of this “blackmail” strategy when reading an excellent biography of William A. Wallace (American Dreamer). Wallace was President Roosevelt’s most left-wing cabinet minister and it was a great surprise when he selected Wallace to be his running-mate in the 1940 Presidential Election.
During the campaign Paul Block, publisher of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, managed to get hold of some letters written by Wallace to Nicholas Roerich in 1933-34. The content of the letters suggested that Wallace held left-wing views and unconventional opinions on religion. Harry Hopkins, one of Roosevelt’s closest political advisers, contacted Block and told him if he published the letters they would reveal that Wendell Willkie, the Republication Party candidate, was having an affair with Irita Van Doren, the literary editor of the New York Herald Tribune. As a result, Block did not publish the letters.

Wallace’s left-wing views meant that party managers got him removed from the ticket in the 1944 Presidential Election (it was clear that Roosevelt would not live for another four years).

Wallace was appalled by Harry Truman’s drift to the right, especially his decision to be a Cold War warrior and his unwillingness to push for civil rights legislation. In 1948 Wallace took on the might of the Democrat and Republican parties.

Wallace travelled to the Deep South and called for the end of the Jim Crow laws. He was attacked at every point he stopped and made a speech. One of his followers said: "You can call us black, or you can call us red, but you can't call us yellow." Wallace commented: "To me, fascism is no longer a second-hand experience. No, fascism has become an ugly reality - a reality which I have tasted it neither so fully nor so bitterly as millions of others. But I have tasted it."


Glen H. Taylor also campaigned against racial discrimination. In Alabama he entered a public hall through an entrance marked "Colored". He pointed out in his autobiography, The Way It Was With Me (1979): "I was a United States senator, and by God, I wasn't going to slink down a dark alley to get to a back door for Bull Connor or any other bigoted son of a bitch. I'd go in any goddamned door I pleased, and I pleased to go in that door right there." Taylor was arrested and at a subsequent trial he was fined $50 and given a 180-day suspended sentence on charges of breach of peace, assault, and resisting arrest.

However, without the protection of the party machine, the Nicholas Roerich letters were published in the mainstream press and Wallace’s chances of getting elected came to an end.
Yesterday, Chris Huhne, the former energy secretary, admitted lying about a speeding ticket that he blamed on his wife in 2003. That was ten years ago and it is no coincidence that the story was first published by two Tory newspapers, the Sunday Times and the Daily Mail, at a time when he was causing problems for David Cameron in his coalition government. Huhne was also against the Murdoch takeover of Sky (Murdoch owns the Sunday Times). Of course, around that time, the other left of centre politician in the cabinet, Vince Cable, was caught in the Tory supporting Daily Telegraph sting that got him taken off the Murdoch takeover bid and given to the pro-Murdoch Jeremy Hunt.

In both cases they were not protected by their party leader, Nick Clegg. Of course, both men were seen as possible replacements for Clegg as party leader. That would have caused problems for David Cameron and the Tory supporting press.

I have no sympathy for either Chris Huhne or Vince Cable who both deserved exposure. However, what about those Tory politicians who are probably getting up to things far worse than Huhne and Cable?
http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USARwallace.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/NDglen_taylor.htm

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAkennedyR.htm

Rayna Prohme

Rayna Prohme had a major impact on the people she met in her short life. While at university she met Dorothy Day. The women became close friends and Day later recorded in her autobiography, The Long Loneliness (1952): "On many occasions I had noticed a young girl, slight and bony, deliciously awkward and yet un self-conscious, alive and eager in her study. She had bright red curly hair. It was loose enough about her face to form an aureole, a flaming aureole, with sun and brightness in it. Her eyes were large, reddish brown and warm, with interest and laughter in them... I saw her first on my way to the university in September. She was the only person I remember on a train filled with students. She was like a flame with her red hair and vivid face. She had a clear, happy look, the look of a person who loved life.... I can see Rayna lying on her side in a dull green dress, her cheek cupped in her hand, her eyes on the book she was reading, her mouth half open in her intent interest."


In 1926 Rayna met the journalist, Vincent Sheean. A mutual friend had described her as a "red-headed gal... who spit fire, mad as a hatter, a complete Bolshevik." Sheean was immediately taken by her: "She was slight, not very tall, with short red-gold hair and a frivolous turned-up nose. Her eyes could actually change colour with the changes of light, or even with changes of mood. Her voice, fresh, cool and very American, sounded as if it had secret rivulets of laughter running underneath it all the time, ready to come to the surface without warning... I had never heard anybody laugh as she did - it was the gayest, most unself-conscious sound in the world. You might have thought that it did not come from a person at all, but from some impulse of gaiety in the air."


Rayna and Sheean went to Moscow together. Rayna wanted to study at the Lenin Institute "to be trained as a revolutionary instrument". Sheean was against the idea arguing that Marxism was "a false cloud". According to Sally J. Taylor, the author of Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty (1990): "They took rooms together, arguing late into the night about her decision. But she found the debates tiring, and often had trouble getting out of bed the following morning."


While on a visit to the apartment of Dorothy Thompson, another journalist based in the Soviet Union, Rayna fainted. She soon became extremely ill and Sheean's friend, Walter Duranty, arranged for her to be seen by a local doctor. Rayna told Sheean: "The doctor thinks I am losing my mind and that is the worst thing of all. He won't say so, but that is what he thinks. I can tell by the way he holds matches in front of my eyes and tests my responses. He doesn't think I can focus on anything."


Vincent Sheean recalled in his autobiography, Personal History (1933): "She had spoken vaguely of the fear before, and all I could do was say that I did not believe it was well founded. But on the next day she felt certain that this was the case, and it kept her silent and almost afraid to speak, even to me. I sat beside her hour after hour in the dark, silent room, and blackness pressed down and in upon us." Sheean said that two or three times she raised her voice to say: "Don't tell anybody". Rayna Prohme died of encephalitis, or inflammation of the brain, on Monday, 21st November 1927.

http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAprohme.htm

Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History

Using New Technologies to Enhance Teaching and Learning in History has just been published by Routledge. It includes articles by Terry Hadyn (What does it mean to be good at ICT as a history teacher and We Need to talk about PowerPoint), Neal Watkin (The history utility belt: getting learners to express themselves digitally), Ali Messer (History Wikis), Arthur Chapman (Using discussion forums to support historical learning), Dan Lyndon (Using blogs and podcasts in the history classroom), Richard Jones-Nerzic (Documentary film making in the history classroom), Terry Haydn (We need to talk about PowerPoint), John Simkin (Making the most of the Spartacus Educational website), Ben Walsh (Signature pedagogies, assumptions and assassins: ICT and motivation in the history classroom), Johannes Ahrenfelt (Immersive learning in the history classroom: how social media can help meet the expectations of a new generation of learners), Alf Wilkinson (What can you do with an interactive whiteboard?), Nick Dennis and Doug Belshaw (Tools for the tech savvy history teacher) and Janos Blasszauer (History webquests).

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Technologies-Enhance-Teaching-Learning-History/dp/0415688388/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1355905764&sr=1-1