False Witness

by Melvin Miller Rader

In the summer of 1948, with Cold War tensions rising, a young state legislator front Spokane, Washington, named Albert Canwell set out to combat the "communist menace" through a state version of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. University of Washington professor Melvin Rader was a victim of the Canwell Committee's rush to judgment, but he fought back. False Witness tells of his struggle to clear his name. It is a testament of personal courage in the face of mass hysteria and a cautionary example of how basic freedoms can rapidly erode when the powers of the state are allowed to serve a rigid ideological agenda. Fifty years after the Canwell Committee's inception, False Witness is reissued as part of the All Powers Project, a multidisciplinary effort by the University of Washington to recreate, reexamine, and redefine the significance today of those tumultuous times. The book includes a new Afterword by Leonard Schroeter, a Seattle attorney and activist who succeeded Melvin Rader as president of the Washington chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.

235 pages, Paperback

First published December 12, 1961

Reviews

[Laura · Rating 4 out of 5]

In May 1948, investigators from my own State’s baby House Unamerican Activities Committee knocked on a on a door in Savery Hall – a building in which I have spent many happy hours. A philosopher professor, Prof. Melvin Rader, answered. They told him he was in the center of a communist conspiracy. They were wrong. They offered him a way out – inform on others. He refused, and was, literally, dragged in front of our own mini House Unamerican Activities Committee, the Canwell committee (holding its hearings in what became the Seattle Center Armory – another building in which I have spent many happy hours).

Professor Rader was the subject of a witch hunt; one of the many victims of our anti communist hysteria. I am embarrassed to say I had not put together we had a mini-House Unamerican Activities Committee. I am horrified to know my legislature indulged in such hysteria, and pleased that the good voters of Spokane did not return Rep. Canwell to the legislature and he never held elected office again.

But the committee destroyed a lot of lives on the way, and apparently felt empowered to use means fair or foul to find prey.

Prof. Rader was one of those people Canwell tried to destroy. Rader survived, bloodied. This is his book.

It’s not a deep book, but it’s a fascinating glimpse of history I’ve brushed up against. Rader was exonerated, in part, of the charge he was at a communist training camp one summer because a Seattle Times reporter found a book card at Suzallo library showing he had checked out a book while he was supposedly being indoctrinated into party discipline on the other side of the country. I worked in Suzallo; I know Seattle Times reporters. I learned a congressman, Marion Zioncheck, committed suicide by jumping out of the Arctic building after writing a note saying “My only hope was to improve the condition of an unfair economic system.” I’ve been in that building many times. Rader was president of the ACLU of Washington. I used to volunteer there. Ken MacDonald wrote a letter to Pres. Allen of the UW, thanking him for exonerating Rader. I knew – albeit not well – Ken MacDonald; he was the mentor of one of my mentors. King County Prosecutor Charles Carroll played a pivotal role at several points. Carroll had an enormous influence who sat on the court I have worked at for sixteen years and I went to law school with his granddaughter. Rader testified in the Goldmark libel case. Another one of my mentors, Len Schroeter, knew the Goldmarks, and the trial led, albeit indirectly, to a crazy man, David Rice, breaking into Charles Goldmark’s house and killing him and his family. The Rice case is one I live with; cited so often it’s become an abstraction.

Rader also mentions in passing that he had once had lunch with Edwin T. Pratt, executive director of the Seattle Urban League – which Jeffrey Robinson later represented in one of my favorite, heartbreaking cases. “Pratt dedicated his life to the fight for human equality, and like others who believed in human brotherhood, he fell before an assassin. On January 26, 1969, he was murdered in the doorway of his home, struck at close range with a shotgun slug.” (178). I learned from the internet that Pratt’s funeral was at St. Marks and Governor Evans attended. I had no idea this happened.

Well worth the time.

[Raleighhunter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Forced to read in basic American History at Texas Tech and I am glad I did. It is a quick, easy read about a college professor whose life was nearly ruined by the Red Scare. That should be a constant reminder how easy it is for Americans to use falsehoods to take away hard fought American freedoms. You don't take away rights and civil liberties to preserve rights and civil liberties.

[Lisa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This was an interesting read it gives a clear, if a biased and one sided one, into the McCarthy era. At a time when America's Red Witch Hunt was in full swing, Rader demonstrates how devastating political prejudice could be -- even in the middle of a democracy. His writing is an easy and fast read; presented primarily in a presentation of facts as he saw them.