O. John Rogge

O. John Rogge (1939)

Oetje John Rogge [ ˈiːtʃi dʒɔn ˈɹɔɡə ], known in public life as O. John Rogge (born  October 12, 1903 in Illinois , †  March 22, 1981 in New York ), was an American lawyer and peace activist. In the Roosevelt administration, he made it up to assistant attorney general and made a name for himself with political criminal proceedings against corruption and against National Socialist activities in the USA. Dismissed under Truman , he was involved in the Progressive Party for the presidential candidacy of Henry A. Wallace . At the same time, Rogge defended anti-fascist and communist activists and groups as a civil rights attorney and took a leading role in the communist-influenced world peace movement, including as a member of the presidium of the Standing Committee of the World Congress of Fighters for Peace, which issued the Stockholm Appeal . After an abrupt political about-face, he appeared against former campaigners from the political left in 1951. His defense of David Greenglass contributed to the death sentences of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg for espionage, and he appeared as a prosecution witness in the W E. B. Du Bois and Peace Information Center trial .

Steep climb

Rogge grew up as the son of German immigrants on a farm in Illinois. Until he started school he is said to have only spoken Low German . The educational climber managed an academic career in law that took him to Harvard via the University of Illinois . At Harvard, Rogge was one of the editors of the Harvard Law Review and earned a doctorate in law in 1931.

After Franklin D. Roosevelt became President of the United States, Rogge moved to Washington, DC in 1933 and worked as a lawyer for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation , a New Deal agency that made government-funded loans to banks and other companies. Soon he became Assistant General Counsel (about: assistant to the chief lawyer) to Securities and Exchange Commission ( United States Securities and Exchange Commission , SEC), where his spektakulärster case, the actions of the authorities against the Transamerica Corporation was one time by the head of Bank of America , Amadeo Giannini , controlled holding . In 1939 Rogge was appointed to the United States Department of Justice , where he headed the criminal justice department as Assistant Attorney General . Rogge immediately took on a task that brought him into the limelight and earned him both praise and violent attacks: He systematically took action against the political corruption that ruled as heir to the government of Governor Huey Long in the state of Louisiana .

As Special Assistant to the United States Attorney General , Francis Biddle , Rogge has been investigating 30 Nazi propagandists in the United States since 1943 on charges of inciting sedition. However, the process dragged on for years. In 1946 Biddle's successor, Attorney General Tom C. Clark , sent Rogge to Germany to research further material there. He conducted a series of interviews and looked at documents. Afterwards he believed he could identify numerous important people from American business, culture and politics as willful or unwilling helpers of the Nazis, including Senator Burton K. Wheeler , the radio preacher Charles Coughlin , Charles Lindbergh and other members of the " America First Committee " , William Rhodes Davis and Henry Ford . However, Clark forbade him to publish his 300-page report. When Rogge did mention names in a speech to Swarthmore College , Clark dismissed him immediately, apparently on the orders of Truman himself.

In contemporary descriptions, the "robust, red-haired, German-blooded trial lawyer" Rogge appears as a precocious and ambitious legal talent who was not afraid of massive disputes, but occasionally overstepped the curve. Rogge was considered a beacon of hope for the Democratic Party . He was unhappily married, according to a younger colleague from the SEC; because he didn't want to go home in the evening, he worked a lot. The marriage was divorced in 1940; a little later, however, Rogge married a second time.

Left civil rights attorney and politician

After his release, Rogge moved to New York and opened a law firm there. He defended left-wing groups and individuals in a series of spectacular political criminal cases. Since 1947 he has represented the Joint Anti-Fascist Refugee Committee against the accusation of "disregard for Congress" raised by the Committee on Un-American Activities . He served as defense counsel in the Smith Act 1949 trials of the United States Communist Party , and served as legal representative of the Federal Employees' Defense Committee in its crackdown on Truman's Loyalty Security Program, a kind of test of opinion for federal government employees .

At the same time, Rogge joined the presidential campaign for Henry A. Wallace. He left the Democratic Party and joined the New York subsidiary of the Progressive Party , the American Labor Party led by Vito Marcantonio . On their list he ran as a judge at the " Surrogate's Court " of New York State, a kind of probate court , but unsuccessfully. Rogge was also chairman of the Wallace for President committee in New York and was seriously under discussion as a vice president on Wallace's team.

In his political activities, Rogge did not spare very sharp criticism of the politics of the USA, in particular McCarthyism . In his numerous public appearances in the 1940s, he repeatedly spoke of “ American-style fascism ”. Above all, the political criminal proceedings against leftists of all kinds attracted his devastating criticism. He published his book Our Vanishing Civil Liberties in 1949 , in which he made his point of view clear. Rogge also held leadership positions in organizations that shared a similar view, such as the Civil Rights Congress and the National Lawyers Guild . The Committee on Un-American Activities therefore claimed in a report that it was linked to "five to ten communist front organizations ".

World peace activist in the Cold War

Rogge spoke at a number of meetings of the communist-influenced world peace movement, including the World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace in Wrocław in 1948, the World Congress of Fighters for Peace in Paris and the Continental Congress for Peace in Mexico City in 1949. Although he belonged to the standard line-up at such meetings, Rogge was an outsider there. He paid tribute neither to the two-camp theory of Zhdanov , as many participants did, nor to the Truman doctrine . Rather, he repeatedly emphasized the shared responsibility of the USA and the Soviet Union as well as the role of the United Nations .

Such assessments, which were often received with reluctance or displeasure at the congresses, did not stand in the way of his election to the twelve-member presidium of the 133-member Standing Committee of the World Congress of Fighters for Peace . He attended the Stockholm meeting of this committee in March 1950 and was therefore directly involved in the acceptance of the Stockholm Appeal , of which he was one of the first signatories. A few days earlier he had presented his “personal peace plan” to the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet in Moscow, the main aim of which was to “move the mountains of fear” that arose between the superpowers. “Moving the Mountains of Fear” was the very pathetic title of his speech.

However, tensions between Rogge and the majority of the Standing Committee soon grew. Two issues were decisive for this: the exclusion of Yugoslavia from the peace movement, which the Standing Committee had decided in 1949, and the Korean War . Rogge visited Yugoslavia in April 1950 and met Josip Broz Tito there . Increasingly he placed his hopes on the non-aligned status of this country and even acted as an advisor to Yugoslavia in the USA. This positioning earned him violent attacks from all sides. Rogge responded to the Korean War with appeals for international mediation under the auspices of the United Nations - also a position 'between all stools'. Together with two other outsiders from the Standing Committee, the British Labor MP Konni Zilliacus and the French writer and Resistance fighter Jean Cassou , he drafted a memorandum on these issues and tried to translate it into a resolution of the Presidium of the Standing Committee in August 1950 . The three demands - supplementing the Stockholm appeal with a ban on aggression, re-admitting Yugoslavia, UN mediation in Korea - were not even discussed, let alone accepted.

During his last appearance in the peace movement, in November 1950 at the First World Peace Congress in Warsaw, he addressed not only the hot topics of Yugoslavia and Korea, but also the Chinese invasion of Tibet, even more sharply than before . He also stated: “Today I would no longer sign the Stockholm Appeal.” As expected, the congress participants reacted negatively to this speech; Rogge was not elected to the new World Peace Council.

Political U-turn

Around this time, Rogge made a radical political about-face. Above all, she was tied to two publicly visible events: the espionage trial against Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in spring 1951 and the trial against the Peace Information Center and W. E. B. Du Bois in autumn 1951.

Police photo by David Greenglass

In June 1950, David Greenglass , a former employee of the Los Alamos nuclear center, was arrested on charges of providing information about the atomic bomb to Soviet agents. Rogge took on the defense of Greenglass and his wife, Ruth Greenglass, who was also accused. Greenglass immediately admitted his involvement and incriminated his brother-in-law Julius Rosenberg, who was arrested shortly afterwards. Rogge convinced Greenglass to stand as a prosecution witness against the Rosenbergs as this would improve his chances in court. In negotiations with the prosecutor, Irving H. Saypol , he tried to get a deal out: a limited prison sentence for Greenglass and a waiver of the prosecution of Ruth Greenglass in exchange for his testimony on the charges against the Rosenbergs. According to contemporary reports, Rogge and Saypol came out of the courtroom "practically arm in arm".

Initially, Greenglass primarily incriminated Julius Rosenberg. At the court hearing in the spring of 1951, however, he also provided extensive information about his own sister, Ethel Rosenberg: He personally saw her typing secret reports about the atomic bomb. This was the only testimony on which the death sentence against Ethel Rosenberg could be based - and the death sentence against Julius Rosenberg would probably not have come about without Greenglass' testimony and Rogge's cooperation, as Roy Cohn , then assigned to the public prosecutor, said in retrospect. The verdict was passed on April 5, 1951: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg were sentenced to death, Greenglass to 15 years' imprisonment, his wife went unpunished. Rogges 'appeal for appeal against Greenglass' judgment was unsuccessful.

W. E. B. Du Bois 1918

In the same year he appeared as a prosecution witness on a trial against the Peace Information Center . This organization, of which Rogge himself was one of the founding members, had set itself the task of distributing the Stockholm appeal to outlaw the atomic bomb in the USA. In February 1951, the 82-year-old historian and black civil rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois, who had previously appeared as an American delegate at various peace congresses with Rogge, was charged with four other members of the organization under the Smith Act : he was an "agent of a foreign principal" , namely the Standing Committee of the World Congress of Fighters in Defense of Peace , took action without registering accordingly. The defendants faced a $ 10,000 fine and five years in prison.

The trial began in November 1951. As a witness for the prosecution, Rogge not only faced Du Bois, but also his former American Labor Party fighter , Vito Marcantonio, who defended Du Bois free of charge. There were fierce arguments. Going beyond the charges, Rogge tried to prove that the Peace Information Center had acted not only as an agent of the Standing Committee , but even as a direct propaganda agency for Soviet politics. But the process ended with a complete acquittal of all defendants.

Rogge was now seen by his old friends on the left as a traitor and a racist. Du Bois even gave him the insulting nickname “Rogge the Rat” in his autobiography .

Withdrawal from the political stage

After this defeat, Rogge refrained from further political appearances. He now ran a law firm in New York with a partner. His name once again got into the international press: in the spring of 1953, confidential documents about the Rosenberg trial, which had been stolen from his office, were leaked to the French magazine Combat . They revealed that David Greenglass was mentally unstable and had changed his statements about the Rosenbergs' involvement several times at the request of the FBI . The international campaign against the execution of the death sentence at the Rosenbergs was based on these documents, but was unsuccessful: the execution took place on July 19, 1953.

Rogge's further legal practice, however, was in many ways similar to his earlier activities. He was involved in a number of lawsuits against restrictions on freedom of expression , including defending a New York bookseller in 1956 on charges of disseminating obscene literature. Rogge represented organizations of ethnic minorities and socially disadvantaged people and was committed to promoting equality for women. He also published numerous books and magazine articles. Among other things, he wrote about the meaning of the First Amendment and the Fifth Amendment , i.e. those constitutional amendments of the USA that prohibit restrictions on freedom of expression and legal protection in principle, and published in a book his collected findings about the National Socialist infiltration in the USA, which he had in 1946 cost the office of Assistant Attorney General.

With 77 years Rogge died at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York on cancer .

reception

From 1949 to 1951, Rogge's activity was the subject of bitter political disputes. This was particularly true of the events of 1951, which were perceived as an extreme break with his political past and provoked violent reactions, especially on the left. Among other things, Rogge was suspected of being a CIA agent, of having acted out of ambition or racial hatred in light of his left-wing past.

The scientific reception of this intellectual has so far remained very modest. Only the Australian social scientist Phillip Deery has so far published a monographic article on Rogge in the journal Cold War History . As with contemporary reception, Deery also focuses on the question of the reasons for Rogge's abrupt political turnaround in 1951. He puts forward the thesis that in the climate of McCarthyism and the beginning of the Cold War, an independent position 'between the blocs' had practically no leeway: “Rogge believed that he could create a kind of middle position for himself and others. But the contrasts of the Cold War turned out to be too extreme ... The Rogge case underscores the dilemma faced by many American intellectuals in the late 1940s: either running the risk of ending up with the Communists or joining the anti-communist crusade. Rogge did neither. "

Fonts

• Our Vanishing Civil Liberties . New York: Gaer, 1949
• Why Men Confess . New York: Nelson, 1959.
• The First and the Fifth, With Some Excursions Into Others . New York: Nelson, 1960.
• The Official German Report: Nazi Penetration 1924–1942. Pan-Arabism 1939 – Today. New York: Yoseloff, 1961.

literature

Phillip Deery: 'A Divided Soul'? The Cold War Odyssey of O. John Rogge . In: Cold War History . Volume 6, No. 2, 2006, pp. 177-204.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Oetje is pronounced like eachie , cf. the information in Time , February 27, 1939, online
2. ^ In addition to Deery 2006, p. 181, also Harnett Thomas Kane: Louisiana hayride: the American rehearsal for dictatorship, 1928–1940 , New York: Morrow, 1941, p. 314.
3. ↑ On the Reconstruction Finance Corporation cf. Walker F. Todd: History of and Rationales for the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. In: Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland, Economic Review , Vol. 28, No. 4, pp. 22-35, Jan. 12, 1992. Online .
4. ↑ See Time of February 27, 1939.
5. ↑ More detailed on this Harnett Thomas Kane: Louisiana hayride: the American rehearsal for dictatorship, 1928–1940 , New York: Morrow, 1941, p. 314ff.
6. ↑ So Deery 2006, p. 182. For more details on this process, with opposing political evaluations: Mimi Clark Grönlund, Ramsey Clark : Supreme Justice Tom C. Clark: A Life of Service , pp. 93-94; Albert E. Kahn : High Treason. The Plot against the People , pp. 256ff. Rogge's investigations also attracted attention in the German-language press after the war, cf. Article I'm accusing! in the Jewish weekly newspaper Aufbau dated December 6, 1946 (vol. 12, No. 49, p. 1, online ) as well as the report USA cooperation with Nazis in the Social Democratic Press Service dated January 28, 1947 ( online ; PDF ; 287 kB), p. 6.
7. ^ The Cabinet: Lay Bishop . In: Time of August 28, 1939.
8. ↑ The report by lawyer Bernard David Meltzer from the SEC can be found here as a pdf. The divorce is reported in the New York Times on July 27, 1940; the new marriage is mentioned in Time of December 23, 1940.
9. ↑ The office and the candidates are presented in a contemporary structure article: Richard Dyck: The election of the "Defender of Widows and Orphans". Candidates for election to the Surrogate Court Judge . In: Aufbau , October 22, 1948, pp. 7–8, online
10. ^ Committee on Un-American Activities, US House of Representatives (Ed.): Report on the Communist "Peace" Offensive. A Campaign To Disarm and Defeat the United States . Washington, DC, April 1, 1951, p. 108.
11. ↑ Deery 2006, p. 183.Deery's table of contents follows the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists , Vol. 6, No. 4 (April 1950), p. 128.
12. ↑ The memorandum remained unpublished. However, a copy that Rogge sent to a confidante in the State Department was preserved. Quotes from it can be found in Deery 1006, p. 185.
13. ^ According to Deery 2006, p. 191.
14. ↑ Cf. beside Deery 2006, p. 180, also: Robert J. Lamphere, Tom Shachtman: The FBI – KGB War. A Special Agent's Story , p. 183.
15. ↑ See Robert J. Lamphere, Tom Shachtman: The FBI – KGB War. A Special Agent's Story , Macon: Mercer University Press, 1995, p. 185.
16. ↑ See the information in John F. Neville: The press, the Rosenbergs, and the Cold War . Westport 1995, p. 15.
17. ↑ According to Deery 2006, p. 180; Deery here quotes Sidney Zion: The Autobiography of Roy Cohn , Secaucus 1988, p. 71.
18. ↑ This episode is missing from Deery, but can be found in John F. Neville: The press, the Rosenbergs, and the Cold War . Westport 1995, pp. 117ff.
19. ↑ It was the case of Roth v. United States, cf. Statement by Rogge and colleagues (archive link) .
20. ↑ See David Bird: O. John Rogge, 77, Anti-Nazi Activist. In: New York Times , March 23, 1981 .
21. ↑ Some examples of such suspicions in Deery 2006, p. 180.
22. ↑ Deery 2006, pp. 180-181.