Lee Pressman

Lee Pressman (July 1, 1906 – November 20, 1969) was a labor attorney and earlier a US government functionary, publicly alleged in 1948 to have been a spy for Soviet intelligence during the mid-1930s (as a member of the Ware Group), following his recent departure from Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) as a result of its purge of Communist Party members and fellow travelers.

Pressman was born Leon Pressman on July 1, 1906, on the Lower East Side of in New York City, first of two sons of immigrants Harry and Clara Pressman of Minsk.

His father was a milliner on the Lower East Side of New York City.

As a child, Leon survived polio.

In his teens, the family moved out to the Bensonhurst section of Brooklyn.

In 1922, he entered Washington Square College of New York University, where classmates included Nathan Witt and possibly Charles Kramer (later, fellow AAA and Ware Group members), then transferred to Cornell University, where he studied under labor economist Sumner Slichter.

In 1926, Pressman received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

In 1929, he received a law degree from Harvard Law School.

At Harvard, he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa and was in the same class as Alger Hiss.

With future defending lawyer Edward Cochrane McLean, they served on the Harvard Law Review:

Mr. Hiss: ... Lee Pressman was in my class at the Harvard Law School, and we were both on the Harvard Law Review at the same time.

After graduation, he joined the law firm of Chadbourne, Stanchfield & Levy (currently Chadbourne & Parke) in New York City.

(During the Great Depression, founder Thomas Chadbourne asserted that the capitalist system itself was "on trial" and became an early champion of both collective bargaining rights and profit sharing for workers. ) There, he worked for Jerome Frank (future chair of the SEC).

When Jerome left in 1933 to work in FDR's New Deal, Pressman joined a small firm called Liebman, Blumenthal & Levy, to handle Jerome's clients.

In 1933, Pressman joined the Ware Group at the invitation of Harold Ware, a Communist agricultural journalist in Washington, DC: "I was asked to join by a man named Harold Ware" (See "Ware Group" sub-section, below)

In July 1933, Pressman received appointment as assistant general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace.

He reported to Jerome Frank, who was general counsel.

The New Dealers saw the AAA as complementing the National Recovery Act (NRA – where fellow Ware Group member and lifelong Hiss friend Henry Collins worked).

As they arrived at AAA, two camps quickly arose: previously existing officials who favored agribusiness interests and New Deal appointees who sought to protect small farmers (and farm laborers) and consumers as much as agribusiness.

Or, as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. summarized the attitude, "There were too many Ivy League men, too many intellectuals, too many radicals, too many Jews."

By December 1933, Frank had hired John Abt and Arthur (or Howard) Bachrach (brother of Abt's sister Marion Abt Bachrach) to develop litigation strategies for agricultural reform policies.

In February 1935, Chester Davis fired many of Frank's cadre, including Pressman, Frank, Gardner Jackson, and two others.

By April 1935, Pressman had been appointed general counsel in the Works Progress Administration by Harry L. Hopkins.

A joint resolution dated January 21, 1935, called the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, passed in the United States Congress and became law on April 8, 1935.

As a result, on May 6, 1935, FDR issued Executive Order 7034, that essentially transformed the Federal Emergency Relief Administration into the Works Progress Administration.

"Pressman set to work analyzing the budget request that would transform FERA into the WPA."

By mid-summer 1935, Rexford G. Tugwell appointed him general counsel of the Resettlement Administration.

Pressman split his time between the two agencies.

Pressman left government service in the winter of 1935-36 and went into private law practice in New York City with David Scribner as Pressman & Scribner.

Clients included the Marine Engineers Beneficial Association (MEBA), the United Public Workers CIO, and other unions.

From 1936 to 1948, he represented the CIO and member unions in landmark collective bargaining deals with major corporations including General Motors and U.S. Steel.

According to journalist Murray Kempton, anti-communists referred to him as "Comrade Big."

In June 1936, he was named a counsel of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO—later AFL-CIO) for the Steel Workers Organizing Committee (SWOC—later, the United Steelworkers of America), appointed by union chief John L. Lewis as part of a conscious attempt to mobilize left-wing activists on behalf of the new labor federation.

According to scholars, "One of Pressman's unofficial roles in the CIO was liaison between the CIO's Communist faction and its predominantly non-Communist leadership."

In 1936-1937, he supported the Great Flint Sit-Down Strike.

However, by year's end (he recollected in a letter to Tugwell in 1937), he came to believe that New Deals changes occurred only when "major controlling financial interests" concurred or when "financial interests had been able to seize effective control of the code and manipulate it to enhance their power."

In 1943, during hearings by a Dies Committee "Special Committee on Un-American Activities," director of research J.B. Matthews asked whether witness Lucien Koch had retained the New York City law firm of "Hays, St. John, Abramson, and Schulman" and "Is this Lee Pressman's firm?"; Koch confirmed "yes."

(Osmond K. Fraenkel, a fellow member of the National Lawyers Guild, was also a member of Hays, St. John, Abramson, and Schulman. )

In his role as the CIO's general counsel, Pressman was influential in helping to stop the attempt to deport Communist Longshoreman's Union official Harry Bridges.

He continued to interact with Bridges well into June 1948, as longshoremen continued to threaten strikes on the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts and Bridges remained president of the International Longshore and Warehouse Union.