Last week I was bragging about being able to unload about two hundred books, slightly relieving the distressed shelves of my library and slightly relaxing marital tension, with what was generously described as “a good first step”. The essay was a self-indulgent ode to bibliographical virtue. This week you get the palinode—a fancy word for “retraction” or in politic-speak “walking back.”
I had gathered the books I purged last week more than ten years ago when I was writing The Anti-Communist Manifestos. This was a work of literary history unlike anything I had done before. There was no single reason I undertook it, but a decisive influence was my accidental discovery of a writer previously unknown to me, Richard Krebs, a German immigrant who wrote in English under the name of Jan Valtin. Only a few experts respond to the name of Jan Valtin today, but in 1941he was America’s best-selling author, and the controversy swirling about him and his blockbuster book (Out of the Night) remains an important episode in the curious history of American Communism. Valtin, as I will call him, had been a Communist agent working in the German merchant marine. He may also have been a Nazi agent. He entered America illegally in the mid-1920s, was convicted of armed robbery in Los Angeles in 1926, and served time in San Quentin before being deported in 1929. He returned to America, again illegally, a decade later, jumping ship in Virginia and making his way to New York with the intention of making it here as a writer. His success in achieving that goal was astonishing, but fame brought its own problems. One of them was that he was an enemy alien and a convicted felon who was in flagrant violation of American law simply by being here, but I will say no more of that for a moment. The problem as he and his publisher saw it was this: how quickly could he put together a best-selling sequel to Out of the Night?
The only thing he had in the ice box, so to speak, were some random sketches he had published in the San Quentin prisoners’ literary journal when he was a stripling youth. These had been assignments in an extension writing course offered by the University of California, and taught by a high-minded and socially engaged journalism professor. The pieces are not very good, and the book Bend in the River is more or less, well, blah. It pretty much flopped. But it is a genuine Jan Valtin book, and the copy I was about to give away is inscribed by the author. This is not unusual. He was lavish with his authorial signature. But I had forgotten that this copy was signed, and I decided that I must keep it. And since I was keeping it, maybe I’d better actually look at the inscription: To Mary E. Gallagher in appreciation of her gallant and selfless friendship. Jan Valtin. March 12, 1942. Hmmm.
I then did something mad. I presented the name “Mary E. Gallagher” to my friend Google. As expected, there were approximately three million hits for approximately four hundred people named Mary E. Gallagher. But I didn’t give up. I then tried “Mary E. Gallagher Jan Valtin.” For this you get precisely one suggestion, but it made my day. If the general history of radical movements in twentieth-century America should be something that interests you, I suggest you do the same thing and I promise you the same results. For what shows up is a substantial typed document, the transcript of a long interview given by Mary Gallagher to a researcher in an oral history project at the University of California on December 18, 1955.*
Mary Gallagher would have at that time been 72. Her immediate ancestors were Irish famine refugees. She had spent most of her life—like so many of our lives, directed by personal inclination interacting with accident and opportunity—in the radical labor movement. She knew most of the leaders of the International Workers of the World (the IWW or “Wobblies”) and experienced the effects of the national hysteria of the “Red Scare” of World War I and its postwar aftermath. As a girl in Chicago she had fallen under the sway of the charismatic Honoré Jaxon, who had been the right hand man to the leader of the Métis (mestizo) rebellion in the Northwest territory of Canada in 1885. She knew Emma Goldman. She abandoned her Catholicism before she was twenty, but seems not to have replaced it with a doctrinaire political dogma, of which plenty were available at the time. Her heart burned for justice. What the Berkeley historians seemed most interested in were her roles in leading the defense committees for Tom Mooney and, later, Warren Billings, IWW martyrs long imprisoned in San Quentin on manifestly framed-up charges. The Mooney-Billings affair (1916) is probably still regarded today by most labor historians as second only to the Sacco-Vanzetti case of the 1920s in the celebrated iniquity of its injustice. (And there’s a pretty good chance that Sacco, at least, was guilty of murder.) Eventually Gallagher’s work paid off. First Mooney, and then Billings, gained release. There’s more, much more, fascinating material in Gallagher’s interview. She was involved in important episodes of American racial injustice. Her second husband was a vaudeville performer, and she invested much energy in the National Theater Project. I’d like to know a good deal more about this amazing little old lady, but I have to fast-forward to page 114 of her interview to get back to Jan Valtin.
In 1941 the real Jan Valtin, Richard Krebs, was the sensationally successful author of a supposed autobiography that was, among other things, a devastating exposure of international Communist criminality. Unfortunately, he was also a criminal himself. Powerful forces, including the surprisingly influential American Communist Party and its legion of fellow-travelers, joined in strange alliance with right-wing super-patriots like the popular columnist Westbrook Pegler, were doing everything they could to get him discredited and deported. Of several hoops he must leap through, the first was presented by his criminal conviction for armed robbery in Los Angeles fifteen years earlier. This problem could go away only with the active intervention of the sitting Governor of California with his pardoning power. In my treatment of this problem in The Anti-Communist Manifestos I struggled to figure out how Krebs pulled this off. As I surveyed my materials, Culbert Olsen, the governor in question and the most radical governor in America, possibly in American history, seemed to me the unknown unknown. I got it mainly right. Krebs was backed by (among others) the head of the ACLU, by an influential Democratic congressman from Los Angeles, and by a celebrity Iowa farmer who had Olson’s ear. Those were the intermediaries I knew about and invoked. But all the time more important testimony lay hidden in the uncontemplated inscription that Krebs/Valtin had written on the fly-leaf of my battered ex-library copy of Bend in the River on March 12, 1942. Krebs had been rescued by the “gallant and selfless friendship” of Mary E. Gallagher. Gallagher, head of the Mooney Defense Fund, had worked closely with Olson. The two were soulmates in their thirst for justice and their attitudes toward underdogs. Krebs surreptitiously travelled to California to consult with her. She introduced him to Olson, as she explains in her interview. She could not have known, because scarcely anyone alive knew, the actual political ambiguities of Krebs’s past.
One serendipity leads to another. I hope to find out more about Mary Gallagher, and perhaps write a little something about her in collaboration with a dear old friend, Christine Stansell, my one-time colleague and now a University of Chicago professor emerita. She has written important books in the field of American women’s history and hence knows a lot I don’t know. She was in the first class of Princeton undergraduate women; and half a century ago she spent time with our family and other young friends battling the wilds of the Ozark wilderness in the attempt to construct a log cabin. We are now both getting a bit long in the tooth, so this imagined collaboration may never happen. But the inevitable unpleasantness of the aging process can be softened by harmless pipe-dreams. And as Browning puts it in “Andrea del Sarto”: Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for? In light of my subject I point out that the word man there is not gender specific. In the old usage it means humankind.
*https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/gallagher_mary.pdf.
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