Annie Lee Moss
Encyclopedia
Annie Lee Moss was a communications clerk in the US Army Signal Corps in the Pentagon
and alleged member of the American Communist Party. She was believed to be a security risk by the FBI and her superiors at the US Army Signal Corps and was questioned by United States Senator
Joseph McCarthy
in his role as the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The highly publicized case was damaging to McCarthy's popularity and influence.
. She had six siblings, and her father was a tenant farmer
. Her family moved to North Carolina
where she left high school to work as a domestic servant and a laundress. She married Ernest Moss in 1926, and they moved to Durham, North Carolina
and she worked in the tobacco industry.
communications clerk at the Pentagon. A widowed mother, Moss had steadily improved her position since moving to Washington in the early 1940s. She bought a home in 1950 and by 1954 had an annual income of $3,300 a year, well above the median for black women at the time.
In accordance with a loyalty review program
introduced by President Harry S. Truman
in 1947, Moss was investigated by the loyalty board of the General Accounting Office in October 1949. The next year, when Moss was promoted to communications clerk at the Pentagon, she was reinvestigated by the Army’s Loyalty-Security Screening Board. The result of this investigation was that Moss was suspended from her position with the recommendation that she be discharged. She appealed this decision and was cleared by the Army board in January 1951.
, who, working as an informant for the FBI, had joined the Communist Party from 1943 to 1949. Markward held such positions as membership director and treasurer for the Party. She reported regularly to the FBI, gave them copies of party documents, membership lists, and detailed accounts of meetings and activities. In February 1954, Markward testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee
. Although she could not identify Moss personally, she testified that she had seen Annie Lee Moss's name and address on the Communist Party’s membership rolls in 1944.
At this point Moss came to Senator Joseph McCarthy
's attention. McCarthy, in his capacity as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was looking into charges of Communist infiltration of the army, specifically at the Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth
.
Moss and her attorney, George Edward Chalmer Hayes
, appeared before McCarthy's committee on March 11, 1954, at an open public session. McCarthy had made headlines with the case, claiming that Moss was "handling the encoding and decoding
of confidential and top-secret messages..." This was incorrect, as the Army pointed out: Moss handled only unreadable, encrypted messages, and had no access to the Pentagon code room.
McCarthy left the hearing room shortly after Moss's testimony began, leaving his chief counsel Roy Cohn
to handle the rest of the questioning. Moss was a small, soft-spoken and seemingly timid woman who appeared to be a far cry from the intellectuals and political activists who were usually the target of McCarthy's investigations. She stated that she rarely read newspapers and hadn't even heard of Communism until 1948. She had difficulty with multi-syllable words when asked to read a document before the committee, and responded "Who's that?" when asked if she knew who Karl Marx
was, evoking laughter from the audience. She denied the charges, saying "Never at any time have I been a member of the Communist Party and I have never seen a Communist Party card," and "I didn't subscribe to the Daily Worker
and I wouldn't pay for it."
Cohn's examination of Moss quickly ran into difficulty. After he noted that a "Communist activist" named Rob Hall was known to have visited Moss's home, it was pointed out (by Robert Kennedy, then the minority counsel for the committee) that there were two Rob Halls in Washington: a known Communist, who was white, and a union organizer, who was African-American. Moss said that the Rob Hall she knew was "a man of about my complexion". As the hearing proceeded, it became clear that both the senators and the spectators were favoring Moss over Cohn and McCarthy. When Cohn asserted that he had corroboration of Markward's testimony from a confidential source, Senator John McClellan
rebuked him for alluding to evidence he was not actually presenting.
Chairman Karl Mundt
ruled that Cohn's comments be stricken from the record. McClellan responded:
As had happened several times already, loud applause erupted from the spectators.
Senator Stuart Symington
then suggested that, as with Rob Hall, the case against Moss might be a matter of mistaken identity. Moss immediately agreed, saying there were three women named Annie Lee Moss in Washington D.C.
Symington said, "I may be sticking my neck out and I may be wrong, but I've been listening to you testify this afternoon and I think you're telling the truth." Again there was loud and prolonged applause.
's television show See It Now
had filmed the Moss hearing, and the case was the subject of the episode broadcast on March 16, 1954. The previous week's show had been Murrow's famous "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy" broadcast, which was deeply critical of McCarthy (and the subject of the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck). Murrow opened the Annie Lee Moss show saying it would present a "little picture about a little woman", and closed it with a sound recording of a speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower
in which the President praised the right of Americans to "meet your accuser face to face". The public's response to both shows was highly favorable, and because of them Murrow is widely credited with contributing to the eventual downfall of McCarthy. Support for Moss and criticism of McCarthy was widespread. In one of the more famous quotations from the McCarthy era, John Crosby
wrote in the New York Herald Tribune
, "The American People fought a revolution to defend, among other things, the right of Annie Lee Moss to earn a living, and Senator McCarthy now decided she has no such right." Reporting on public opinion in McCarthy's home state, Drew Pearson
wrote, "Wisconsin folks saw her as a nice old colored lady who wasn't harming anyone and they didn't like their senator picking on her."
d by the Senate, and spent the rest of his career in relative obscurity. He died in 1957.
Moss had been suspended from her position when McCarthy announced his interest in the case. In January 1955 she was rehired to a non-sensitive position in the army's finance and accounts office, and she remained an army clerk until her retirement in 1975. She died in 1996, aged 90.
In 1958 the Subversive Activities Control Board
investigated a related case and confirmed Markward’s testimony that Moss’s name and address had appeared on the Communist party rolls in the mid-1940s. Several sources have reported this as proving that Moss was a Communist. More substantive is the evidence contained in Moss's FBI file, some of which wasn't revealed until the file was released through a Freedom of Information Act request. Andrea Friedman describes this evidence as "perhaps a dozen pieces of paper – included a list of 'party recruits' that identified Moss by name, race, age, and occupation; membership lists from two Communist party branches, the Communist Political Association, and various ad hoc committees containing Moss’s name and address, as well as the number of her Communist Party membership book; and receipt records from 1945 for Daily Worker
subscriptions." Friedman concludes that Moss most likely had indirect contact with Communists through her cafeteria workers' union, and at most was probably a "casual recruit to the Communist Party, attracted by its social and economic justice politics," and later abandoned any associations with them.
While some have noted it as showing laxity on the part of the army's security review board, it is has not changed the overall picture of McCarthy and his methods presented by the media.
The Pentagon
The Pentagon is the headquarters of the United States Department of Defense, located in Arlington County, Virginia. As a symbol of the U.S. military, "the Pentagon" is often used metonymically to refer to the Department of Defense rather than the building itself.Designed by the American architect...
and alleged member of the American Communist Party. She was believed to be a security risk by the FBI and her superiors at the US Army Signal Corps and was questioned by United States Senator
United States Senate
The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
in his role as the chairman of the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. The highly publicized case was damaging to McCarthy's popularity and influence.
Early years
She was born as Annie Lee Crawford in 1905 in South CarolinaSouth Carolina
South Carolina is a state in the Deep South of the United States that borders Georgia to the south, North Carolina to the north, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. Originally part of the Province of Carolina, the Province of South Carolina was one of the 13 colonies that declared independence...
. She had six siblings, and her father was a tenant farmer
Tenant farmer
A tenant farmer is one who resides on and farms land owned by a landlord. Tenant farming is an agricultural production system in which landowners contribute their land and often a measure of operating capital and management; while tenant farmers contribute their labor along with at times varying...
. Her family moved to North Carolina
North Carolina
North Carolina is a state located in the southeastern United States. The state borders South Carolina and Georgia to the south, Tennessee to the west and Virginia to the north. North Carolina contains 100 counties. Its capital is Raleigh, and its largest city is Charlotte...
where she left high school to work as a domestic servant and a laundress. She married Ernest Moss in 1926, and they moved to Durham, North Carolina
Durham, North Carolina
Durham is a city in the U.S. state of North Carolina. It is the county seat of Durham County and also extends into Wake County. It is the fifth-largest city in the state, and the 85th-largest in the United States by population, with 228,330 residents as of the 2010 United States census...
and she worked in the tobacco industry.
Career
Moss began her career in the Federal government as a dessert cook in government cafeterias. In 1945, she moved to a job as a clerk in the General Accounting Office and in 1949 secured a civil service position as an Army Signal CorpsUnited States Army Signal Corps
The United States Army Signal Corps develops, tests, provides, and manages communications and information systems support for the command and control of combined arms forces. It was established in 1860, the brainchild of United States Army Major Albert J. Myer, and has had an important role from...
communications clerk at the Pentagon. A widowed mother, Moss had steadily improved her position since moving to Washington in the early 1940s. She bought a home in 1950 and by 1954 had an annual income of $3,300 a year, well above the median for black women at the time.
In accordance with a loyalty review program
Executive Order 9835
President Harry S. Truman signed United States Executive Order 9835, sometimes known as the "Loyalty Order", on March 21, 1947. The order established the first general loyalty program in the United States, designed to root out communist influence in the U.S. federal government...
introduced by President Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman
Harry S. Truman was the 33rd President of the United States . As President Franklin D. Roosevelt's third vice president and the 34th Vice President of the United States , he succeeded to the presidency on April 12, 1945, when President Roosevelt died less than three months after beginning his...
in 1947, Moss was investigated by the loyalty board of the General Accounting Office in October 1949. The next year, when Moss was promoted to communications clerk at the Pentagon, she was reinvestigated by the Army’s Loyalty-Security Screening Board. The result of this investigation was that Moss was suspended from her position with the recommendation that she be discharged. She appealed this decision and was cleared by the Army board in January 1951.
Charges, appearance before McCarthy
In September 1951, the FBI notified the General Accounting Office of evidence Moss had been a member of the Communist Party in the mid-1940s, but at that time the army did not reopen the case. This evidence came from Mary Stalcup MarkwardMary Stalcup Markward
Mary R. Stalcup Markward was for seven years a member of the Washington, DC "District Communist Party" as director of the party's membership. She was actually working undercover for the FBI.-Biography:...
, who, working as an informant for the FBI, had joined the Communist Party from 1943 to 1949. Markward held such positions as membership director and treasurer for the Party. She reported regularly to the FBI, gave them copies of party documents, membership lists, and detailed accounts of meetings and activities. In February 1954, Markward testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee
House Un-American Activities Committee
The House Committee on Un-American Activities or House Un-American Activities Committee was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives. In 1969, the House changed the committee's name to "House Committee on Internal Security"...
. Although she could not identify Moss personally, she testified that she had seen Annie Lee Moss's name and address on the Communist Party’s membership rolls in 1944.
At this point Moss came to Senator Joseph McCarthy
Joseph McCarthy
Joseph Raymond "Joe" McCarthy was an American politician who served as a Republican U.S. Senator from the state of Wisconsin from 1947 until his death in 1957...
's attention. McCarthy, in his capacity as chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, was looking into charges of Communist infiltration of the army, specifically at the Army Signal Corps laboratories at Fort Monmouth
Fort Monmouth
Fort Monmouth was an installation of the Department of the Army in Monmouth County, New Jersey. The post is surrounded by the communities of Eatontown, Tinton Falls and Oceanport, New Jersey, and is located about 5 miles from the Atlantic Ocean. The post covers nearly of land, from the Shrewsbury...
.
Moss and her attorney, George Edward Chalmer Hayes
George Edward Chalmer Hayes
George Edward Chalmers Hayes was a Washington, DC lawyer who defended Annie Lee Moss, was the lead attorney in Bolling v...
, appeared before McCarthy's committee on March 11, 1954, at an open public session. McCarthy had made headlines with the case, claiming that Moss was "handling the encoding and decoding
Encryption
In cryptography, encryption is the process of transforming information using an algorithm to make it unreadable to anyone except those possessing special knowledge, usually referred to as a key. The result of the process is encrypted information...
of confidential and top-secret messages..." This was incorrect, as the Army pointed out: Moss handled only unreadable, encrypted messages, and had no access to the Pentagon code room.
McCarthy left the hearing room shortly after Moss's testimony began, leaving his chief counsel Roy Cohn
Roy Cohn
Roy Marcus Cohn was an American attorney who became famous during Senator Joseph McCarthy's investigations into Communist activity in the United States during the Second Red Scare. Cohn gained special prominence during the Army–McCarthy hearings. He was also an important member of the U.S...
to handle the rest of the questioning. Moss was a small, soft-spoken and seemingly timid woman who appeared to be a far cry from the intellectuals and political activists who were usually the target of McCarthy's investigations. She stated that she rarely read newspapers and hadn't even heard of Communism until 1948. She had difficulty with multi-syllable words when asked to read a document before the committee, and responded "Who's that?" when asked if she knew who Karl Marx
Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement...
was, evoking laughter from the audience. She denied the charges, saying "Never at any time have I been a member of the Communist Party and I have never seen a Communist Party card," and "I didn't subscribe to the Daily Worker
Daily Worker
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
and I wouldn't pay for it."
Cohn's examination of Moss quickly ran into difficulty. After he noted that a "Communist activist" named Rob Hall was known to have visited Moss's home, it was pointed out (by Robert Kennedy, then the minority counsel for the committee) that there were two Rob Halls in Washington: a known Communist, who was white, and a union organizer, who was African-American. Moss said that the Rob Hall she knew was "a man of about my complexion". As the hearing proceeded, it became clear that both the senators and the spectators were favoring Moss over Cohn and McCarthy. When Cohn asserted that he had corroboration of Markward's testimony from a confidential source, Senator John McClellan
John Little McClellan
John Little McClellan was a Democratic Party politician from Arkansas. He represented Arkansas in the United States Senate from 1943 until 1977. He also earlier represented Arkansas in the United States House of Representatives.-Early life:McClellan was born in Sheridan, Grant County, Arkansas...
rebuked him for alluding to evidence he was not actually presenting.
Chairman Karl Mundt
Karl Earl Mundt
Karl Earl Mundt was an American educator and a Republican member of the United States Congress, representing South Dakota in the United States House of Representatives from 1938 to 1948 and in the United States Senate from 1948 to 1973.-Biography:Born in Humboldt, South Dakota, Mundt attended...
ruled that Cohn's comments be stricken from the record. McClellan responded:
- "You can't strike these statements made by counsel here as to evidence that we're having and withholding. You cannot strike that from the press nor from the public mind once it's planted there. That's the – that is the – evil of it. It is not sworn testimony. It is convicting people by rumor and hearsay and innuendo."
As had happened several times already, loud applause erupted from the spectators.
Senator Stuart Symington
Stuart Symington
William Stuart Symington was a businessman and political figure from Missouri. He served as the first Secretary of the Air Force from 1947 to 1950 and was a Democratic United States Senator from Missouri from 1953 to 1976.-Education and business career:...
then suggested that, as with Rob Hall, the case against Moss might be a matter of mistaken identity. Moss immediately agreed, saying there were three women named Annie Lee Moss in Washington D.C.
Symington said, "I may be sticking my neck out and I may be wrong, but I've been listening to you testify this afternoon and I think you're telling the truth." Again there was loud and prolonged applause.
See It Now and other coverage
A cameraman from Edward R. MurrowEdward R. Murrow
Edward Roscoe Murrow, KBE was an American broadcast journalist. He first came to prominence with a series of radio news broadcasts during World War II, which were followed by millions of listeners in the United States and Canada.Fellow journalists Eric Sevareid, Ed Bliss, and Alexander Kendrick...
's television show See It Now
See It Now
See It Now is an American newsmagazine and documentary series broadcast by CBS from 1951 to 1958. It was created by Edward R. Murrow and Fred W. Friendly, Murrow being the host of the show. From 1952 to 1957, See It Now won four Emmy Awards and was nominated three times...
had filmed the Moss hearing, and the case was the subject of the episode broadcast on March 16, 1954. The previous week's show had been Murrow's famous "A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy" broadcast, which was deeply critical of McCarthy (and the subject of the 2005 film Good Night, and Good Luck). Murrow opened the Annie Lee Moss show saying it would present a "little picture about a little woman", and closed it with a sound recording of a speech by Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight D. Eisenhower
Dwight David "Ike" Eisenhower was the 34th President of the United States, from 1953 until 1961. He was a five-star general in the United States Army...
in which the President praised the right of Americans to "meet your accuser face to face". The public's response to both shows was highly favorable, and because of them Murrow is widely credited with contributing to the eventual downfall of McCarthy. Support for Moss and criticism of McCarthy was widespread. In one of the more famous quotations from the McCarthy era, John Crosby
John Crosby (media critic)
John Crosby was a newspaper columnist, radio-television critic, novelist and TV host. During the 1950s, he was generally regarded as the leading critic of television....
wrote in the New York Herald Tribune
New York Herald Tribune
The New York Herald Tribune was a daily newspaper created in 1924 when the New York Tribune acquired the New York Herald.Other predecessors, which had earlier merged into the New York Tribune, included the original The New Yorker newsweekly , and the Whig Party's Log Cabin.The paper was home to...
, "The American People fought a revolution to defend, among other things, the right of Annie Lee Moss to earn a living, and Senator McCarthy now decided she has no such right." Reporting on public opinion in McCarthy's home state, Drew Pearson
Drew Pearson (journalist)
Andrew Russell Pearson , known professionally as Drew Pearson, was one of the best-known American columnists of his day, noted for his muckraking syndicated newspaper column "Washington Merry-Go-Round," in which he attacked various public persons, sometimes with little or no objective proof for his...
wrote, "Wisconsin folks saw her as a nice old colored lady who wasn't harming anyone and they didn't like their senator picking on her."
Aftermath of the hearing
McCarthy's popularity was on the wane at the time of the Moss hearing, and the publicity around the case accelerated the process. He would soon be embroiled in the Army–McCarthy hearings which also significantly eroded his standing with the public and in the Senate. In December 1954 he was censureCensure
A censure is an expression of strong disapproval or harsh criticism. Among the forms that it can take are a stern rebuke by a legislature, a spiritual penalty imposed by a church, and a negative judgment pronounced on a theological proposition.-Politics:...
d by the Senate, and spent the rest of his career in relative obscurity. He died in 1957.
Moss had been suspended from her position when McCarthy announced his interest in the case. In January 1955 she was rehired to a non-sensitive position in the army's finance and accounts office, and she remained an army clerk until her retirement in 1975. She died in 1996, aged 90.
Later evidence against Moss
Since Markward’s information included an address for Annie Lee Moss, and Moss confirmed this address in her testimony, the possibility of mistaken identity was never a very realistic one.In 1958 the Subversive Activities Control Board
Subversive Activities Control Board
The Subversive Activities Control Board was a United States government committee to investigate Communist infiltration of American society during the 1950s Red Scare....
investigated a related case and confirmed Markward’s testimony that Moss’s name and address had appeared on the Communist party rolls in the mid-1940s. Several sources have reported this as proving that Moss was a Communist. More substantive is the evidence contained in Moss's FBI file, some of which wasn't revealed until the file was released through a Freedom of Information Act request. Andrea Friedman describes this evidence as "perhaps a dozen pieces of paper – included a list of 'party recruits' that identified Moss by name, race, age, and occupation; membership lists from two Communist party branches, the Communist Political Association, and various ad hoc committees containing Moss’s name and address, as well as the number of her Communist Party membership book; and receipt records from 1945 for Daily Worker
Daily Worker
The Daily Worker was a newspaper published in New York City by the Communist Party USA, a formerly Comintern-affiliated organization. Publication began in 1924. While it generally reflected the prevailing views of the party, some attempts were made to make it appear that the paper reflected a...
subscriptions." Friedman concludes that Moss most likely had indirect contact with Communists through her cafeteria workers' union, and at most was probably a "casual recruit to the Communist Party, attracted by its social and economic justice politics," and later abandoned any associations with them.
Current views
Among some conservative authors, the evidence of Moss's Communist Party membership has been used as part of an attempted vindication of McCarthy.While some have noted it as showing laxity on the part of the army's security review board, it is has not changed the overall picture of McCarthy and his methods presented by the media.