Alfred Kohlberg was an American importer, publisher, and political organizer. He contributed to the founding of Counterattack, a newsletter of "facts to combat Communism. "
Background
Alfred Kohlberg was born on January 27, 1887 in San Francisco, California, United States. He was the son of Manfred Kohlberg, a dry-goods merchant, and Marianne Wurtenberg. His four grandparents, German Jews, immigrated to the United States before the American Civil War.
Education
Kohlberg attended Turk Street School, Hamilton Grammar School, and Lowell High School, where he made the track team and acquired two lifelong interests--printing and writing. In 1904 he entered the University of California at Berkeley, working part-time as a reporter for Oakland newspapers and the Daily Californian, but his college education ended abruptly during the great San Francisco earthquake and fire of April 1906, in which his father's shop was destroyed.
Career
Kohlberg took charge of an emergency printing plant; this first business venture lasted two years. In 1908 he sold the shop and began selling fancy dry goods for his father. He traveled extensively in California and added Dallas, Texas, to his territory in 1910.
Kohlberg made the first of many trips to the Orient in 1916. By then he had become a western states representative, dealing in silks and laces, for a number of New York firms. Handkerchiefs eventually became his chief product. Made of Irish linen purchased in Belfast and shipped to China, they were embroidered by Chinese women from designs created in the United States.
Until the Sino-Japanese war, Kohlberg remained an obscure, if well-traveled, businessman whose enterprises took him to Japan, Iran, France, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom, as well as to China. At first Kohlberg accepted Japan's reasons for its Manchurian occupation, but he later reacted strongly to Japanese aggression, taking an active role in the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China (ABMAC), a member of United China Relief. A licensed pilot, Kohlberg volunteered in 1940 to fly for the Royal Canadian Air Force. Rejected because of his age, he offered his services as a suicide pilot before settling, in 1942, for flying briefly with the Civil Air Patrol on antisubmarine missions over the Gulf of Mexico. During a trip to China in 1943, Kohlberg decided that charges of graft and corruption in the Chinese army medical services were either untrue or exaggerated. He wanted those responsible for the reports recalled, and when they were not, he resigned from ABMAC at the end of 1943. In 1944 Kohlberg began to believe "that the lies about the Chinese Government and Army were Communist propaganda; and that the main source for spreading them in this country was the Institute of Pacific Relations" ("Kohlberg Affidavit"). His vendetta against the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), a research organization formed in 1925 to foster American understanding of Asia, launched a lifelong crusade against communism in general and Chinese communism in particular. Frequenting the New York Public Library several blocks from his Manhattan office, he read articles on the Chinese military and political situation in some IPR publications and compared them to articles from two Communist publications. Then he put together an eighty-eight-page document of clippings and comments and, in an "open letter" (which later became a Kohlberg trademark), called on IPR trustees in November 1944 to "fire all the Reds, because the truth is not in them. " An IPR committee rejected the charges, but Kohlberg demanded an impartial investigation, sued to obtain the group's mailing lists, and publicized his case widely to fellow members before finally losing a proxy fight in 1947 (1, 163 votes to 63) and resigning.
In 1946 he started Plain Talk, a journal that merged with The Freeman in 1950.
Kohlberg's charges against the IPR resurfaced early in 1950 with Senator Joseph R. McCarthy's sensational accusations of espionage and Communist subversion in government. Although McCarthy apparently did not consult him prior to publication of the charges, Kohlberg soon furnished McCarthy with his own IPR materials, which then received national publicity during two consecutive Senate investigations.
In 1956 he got into a controversy with the Treasury Department, which deni ded him a permit to import more than 600, 000 Chinese handkerchiefs suspected, ironically, of being made in the People's Republic of China and not, as Kohlberg had insisted, in Hong Kong.
Heart attacks in 1954 and 1955 somewhat curtailed his organizational activities, but Kohlberg kept up a prodigious correspondence, bombarding heads of state, government officials, celebrities, and newspaper editors with long and importunate letters about international affairs. He contributed occasional articles on communism to New Leader and the pro-Nationalist China Monthly. He circulated a 1959 exchange with Egypt's President Gamal Abdel Nassar to members of the Eighty-sixth Congress. One of his last letters, dated February 29, 1960, implored Secretary of State Christian Herter to deny a magazine report that Herter and others had encouraged Eisenhower to get Chiang Kai-shek to resign in order to make Formosa a United Nations protectorate and admit the People's Republic of China to the United Nations. Six weeks later Kohlberg died in New York City.
Kohlberg left a large bequest to the American Bureau for Medical Aid to China that made possible the Alfred Kohlberg Memorial Research Laboratory on Taiwan, dedicated in 1963.
Achievements
Politics
Kohlberg supported Senator Robert A. Taft of Ohio for the Republican presidential nomination. He disliked the Eisenhower administration's foreign policy and in 1955, with others, formed the Council Against Communist Aggression, which called on the government to "exterminate the Communist conspiracy in the United States, " "withdraw recognition from the Soviet Union and its satellites, " "employ all measures to sap the economic strength of the Communist World, " and return American policies to those of George Washington, the Monroe Doctrine, and the Open Door.
A political gadfly, he seemed to enjoy his notoriety as "the China Lobby man. "
Personality
As a friend observed, Kohlberg saw things in black and white. He argued politics in high-sounding principles, without bitterness, in a courteous though blunt manner. He was simplistic but subtly sarcastic and dryly humorous.
Quotes from others about the person
"His basic aim was to show the evil of Communism and the threat it posed to free men everywhere. " (Joseph Keeley)
"Once he became aware of this evil his sole aim in life was its destruction. "
Connections
Kohlberg married Selma Bachrach on July 26, 1911. They had one son. Kohlberg's wife died in 1919, and two years later he married a former employee, Charlotte Albrecht. They had four children and were divorced in 1932. The following year he married Jane Myers Rossen. Jane Myers Kohlberg died in 1951, and in June 1952 Kohlberg married Ida Jolles, a widow whom he had met in China in 1941.