1. Lee Pressman 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, following his recent departure from Congress of Industrial Organizations as a result of its purge of Communist Party members and fellow travelers.
Lee Pressman's father was a milliner on the Lower East Side of New York City.
In 1926, Lee Pressman received his bachelor's degree from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.
Lee Pressman was in my class at the Harvard Law School, and we were both on the Harvard Law Review at the same time.
In 1933, Lee 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".
In July 1933, Pressman received appointment as assistant general counsel of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration by Secretary of Agriculture Henry A Wallace.
Lee Pressman reported to Jerome Frank, who was general counsel.
Lee Pressman 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.
Lee Pressman listened to advice Pressman that civil rights statues passed to protect African-American voters during the Civil War might grant the federal government authority to intervene in strikes in terms of Free Speech, like strikes in Harlan County, Kentucky.
In June 1938, Lee Pressman moved back to Washington, DC, to become full-time general counsel for the CIO and the SWOC.
Lee Pressman remained in this position for the next decade.
In May 1939, Pressman spoke on behalf of the CIO before the US Senate's Education and Labor sub-committee to support the "National Health Bill", sponsored by US Senator Robert F Wagner.
From May through August 1939, Lee Pressman attacked support for the "Walsh amendments" to the 1935 National Labor Relations Act.
On January 3,1940, Lee Pressman discussed the "1940 Legislative Program of the CIO" on CBS Radio.
In September 1941, Lee Pressman received a pin from pro-Communist Mike Quill, leader of the Transport Workers Union, a CIO member, during a TWU strike.
Lee Pressman then urged TWU strikers to stand up to the New York City government, as he had four years earlier in 1937 when the TWU first left the AFL for the CIO.
CIO president Philip Murray and Lee Pressman both supported the increase.
Lee Pressman approached Murray with the idea, as I did with Hillman.
In September 1943 at a conference of the National Lawyers Guild, Lee Pressman praised labor for reducing strikes and promoting the war effort.
Lee Pressman praised the National War Labor Board's policy for recognizing labor unions as institutions within the basic framework of our democratic society.
Lee Pressman criticized "selfish blocs" in Congress that had opposed FDR's program.
In 1944, Lee Pressman participated in resolution of a labor dispute of a national case in basic steel, involving some six hundreds unions on strike.
Later that month, Lee Pressman joined Murray, Abt, and other CIO officials in Paris for a meeting with Soviet counterparts about the WFTU.
Lee Pressman asked that an "aroused and enlightened public" make itself heard in Congress and in the 1946 fall elections:.
In 1947, Lee Pressman became involved in passage of the Taft-Hartley Act.
Lee Pressman asserted that labor unions do not constitute monopolies, compared with industrial combines.
In June 1947, Pressman wrote an influential critique of the Taft-Hartley Act, used by President Harry S Truman as background material to justify his "bristling" veto of the measure.
In early 1948, Pressman led a group of like-minded colleagues in a pitch to CIO executives to abandon Truman and the Democratic Party for Henry A Wallace and his Progressive Party.
In March 1948, Lee Pressman's name appeared in the New York Times as legal counsel of the Furriers Joint Board.
Lee Pressman sued for a temporary injunction based on failure by employers to give 60-day lockout notice to workers, plus failure to provide thirty-day notification to Federal and state mediation services.
Lee Pressman helped get Potash set free on $5,000 bail while awaiting deportation hearings.
Also in March 1948, Lee Pressman joined a group of lawyers in defending five "aliens" against deportation hearings due to their Communist ties.
Lee Pressman went on to join Joseph Forer, a Washington-based attorney, in representing the five before the US Supreme Court.
On May 16,1948, the United Public Workers read aloud their general counsel Lee Pressman's letter, summarized by the New York Times:.
Mr Lee Pressman contended that the proposed ban would deprive civil service workers of freedom of speech, press and assembly under the first amendment, would violate their right to participate in political activity under the ninth and tenth amendments and would impose a test of "guilt by association" in contravention of the fifth amendment.
On May 19,1948, Securities and Exchange Commission official Anthon H Lund accused Pressman of interfering in a lawsuit filed against the Kaiser-Frazer car manufacturing company in a Federal District Court in New York City.
Lee Pressman was important enough in American politics to have Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Lee Pressman himself promotes the term "Non-Communist Left" as an American modification of Leon Blum's Third Force.
Lee Pressman cites as example the ascendancy of Walter Reuther in the CIO and ouster of Lee Pressman:.
In March 1948, Pressman joined a 700-member national organization in support of Henry A Wallace for US president and Glen H Taylor for US vice president.
On June 9,1948, Lee Pressman declared that he himself was running for public office as the candidate of the American Labor Party for US Congress in the 14th District of New York.
Between 1948 and 1950, Lee Pressman had represented "the estates of persons with heirs in Russia" of interest to the Soviets as well as affairs of AMTORG.
In 1933, Lee Pressman was one of the original members of the Ware Group.
Weinstein noted that, according to Gardner Jackson, Lee Pressman had recommended that the Nye Committee take Alger Hiss on loan.
In 1936, when Lee Pressman began work as general counsel for the CIO, Peters recommended against it, as Lee Pressman was hard to control.
Historian Robert H Zieger held that Pressman was no longer a communist by the time he joined the CIO.
In 1950, Lee Pressman resigned from the American Labor Party because of "Communist control of that organization," which was reported in the press and which signaled HUAC that Lee Pressman was at last ready to talk.
Lee Pressman stated that he had no information about the political views of his former law school classmate Alger Hiss and specifically denied that Hiss was a participant in this Washington group.
Lee Pressman indicated that in at least one meeting of his group, perhaps two, he had met Soviet intelligence agent J Peters.
Lee Pressman became a power among the back-room Reds who steered Henry Wallace through the presidential campaign.
On June 28,1931, Lee Pressman married the former Sophia Platnik.
Lee Pressman was a member of the International Juridical Association, the National Lawyers Guild, and the New York Bar Association.
Sophia Platnik Lee Pressman died on May 12,1980, in Sandia Park, New Mexico.
Lee Pressman never made any bones about his Communist leanings, often supporting the Moscow line.
Less Pressman has exercised a dominant role in the CIO, thanks to his appointment by John L Lewis.
The main reason for his resignation, given by Lee Pressman himself, was that he would be able to participate in the Wallace campaign for the presidency.
Inasmuch as the CIO Executive Board voted in January 1948, three to one against Wallace's candidacy, Lee Pressman's position became untenable.
Long before John L Lewis selected him as general counsel of the CIO, Lee Pressman was a member of the Communist Party.
Right down the line for twelve years, Lee Pressman has been loyal to the Communist Party.
Lee Pressman had to make his choice: either get out of the Communinst Party and hold his job in the CIO, or resign from the CIO and support the Communist Party's candidate.
Lee Pressman did the latter, and in so doing clarified the political situation in the United States in 1948.
In 1946, VENONA reveals that Lee Pressman hosted Mikhail Vavilov, first secretary in the Soviet embassy, at his home in Washington, DC, where he met fellow Ware Group member Charles Kramer.
Lee Pressman had never been the classic 'spy' who stole documents.
Lee Pressman gambled that there would not be anyone to contradict his evasions and that government investigators would not be able to charge him with perjury.
Lee Pressman left one posthumously published memoir, a microfiche transcript of a Columbia University oral history interview:.