The son of a North Carolina Baptist preacher, Paul Crouch had joined the Communist Party in 1925. That same year, as an enlisted man in the U.S. Army, he wrote a letter to CP officials boasting that he had “formed an Esperanto Association as a front for revolutionary activity.” The Army intercepted the letter and concluded that he had been organizing a communist cell at Schofield Barracks in Hawaii. Court-martialed on the charge of “fomenting revolution,” Crouch was sentenced to an extraordinary forty years in prison. At his trial he testified, “I am in the habit of writing letters to my
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