A list of books for the study of the social question, being an introduction to Catholic social literature.
(About the author: Louis Francis Budenz (July 17, 1891 – A...)
About the author: Louis Francis Budenz (July 17, 1891 – April 27, 1972) was an American activist and writer, as well as a Soviet espionage agent and head of the Buben group of spies. He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1945 Budenz renounced Communism and became a vocal anti-Communist, appearing as an expert witness at various governmental hearings and authoring a series of books on his experiences.
("Louis Francis Budenz (July 17, 1891 - April 27, 1972) wa...)
"Louis Francis Budenz (July 17, 1891 - April 27, 1972) was an American activist and writer, as well as a Soviet espionage agent and head of the Buben group of spies. He began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA. In 1945 Budenz renounced Communism and became a vocal anti-Communist, appearing as an expert-witness at various governmental hearings and authoring a series of books on his experiences." ~ wikipedia.com
(Chicago 1952 1st Regnery. This book offers the only autho...)
Chicago 1952 1st Regnery. This book offers the only authoritative and up-to-date account of what American Communists have been doing since 1945 (jacket). Hardcover. Octavo, 242pp., cloth. ***Signed presentation copy from Budenz. Near Fine in VG DJ.
Louis Francis Budenz was an American labor leader and educator. He is remembered as a social activist who shifted from being a member of the Communist Party USA to a vigorous vocal anti-Communist.
Background
Louis Francis Budenz was born on July 17, 1891 in Indianapolis, Indiana, to Henry Joseph Budenz, a bank teller, and Mary Gertrude Sullivan. He was a grandson of German and Irish immigrants, and grew up on the south side in a mostly German and Irish Catholic neighborhood around Fountain Square.
Education
Louis attended St. John's High School in Indianapolis; St. Xavier College in Cincinnati, Ohio; and St. Mary's College in Kansas, before receiving his LL. B. from the Indianapolis Law School in 1912.
Career
Budenz joined the labor movement because Budenz was appalled by the sight of workers unable to live decently on their earnings. In 1913 he became associate editor of The Carpenter, the official publication of the Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners. In 1914, he became assistant director of the Central Catholic Verein in St. Louis.
Between 1914 and 1919 he worked as the secretary of the St. Louis Civic League, and in 1920 he was a franchise expert to the Federal Electric Railways Commission. He then served as a publicity director for the American Civil Liberties Union for about a year.
Returning to labor circles at the age of thirty, he served for ten years (1921 - 1931) as editor of The Labor Age and helped organize strikes by hosiery mill workers in Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1928; silk workers in Paterson, New Jersey, in 1930; and auto workers in Toledo, Ohio, in 1934. In the course of these activities, he was arrested and acquitted twenty-one times.
In 1924, Budenz was the New Jersey campaign manager for Senator Robert M. La Follette of Wisconsin, the Progressive party candidate for president. Budenz drifted further to the left as a member of a group known as the "Muste Trotzkyites" before openly joining the Communist party in October 1935, when Earl Browder, leader of the Party in the United States, asked Budenz to go public with his affiliation.
Accordingly, Budenz announced his allegiance to the Communist International in the columns of The Daily Worker in 1935 and soon became its labor editor. Transferred to Chicago by the Communist party in 1937, Budenz became editor of another leftist publication, the Midwest Daily Record.
Later, while appearing as a witness at the McCarthy hearings, Budenz related that the Hitler-Stalin non-aggression pact, signed in 1939, dealt the death blow to the Midwest Daily Record. Returning to New York City in 1940, Budenz became managing editor of The Daily Worker and president of its publishing house, Freedom of the Press Company.
An announcement of the former Communist's return to the Church was made to the Associated Press on October 10, 1945, by Sheen. In Bishop Sheen's autobiography, he writes about secretly giving the family religious instruction at their home in suburban Westchester County, New York.
Soon thereafter, he joined the economics department at Notre Dame University and moved his family to South Bend, Indiana. Within a year, he returned to New York City to join the faculty of Fordham University, another Catholic institution whose 1950 class voted Budenz "its favorite personality in the news. "
Beginning in 1946, Budenz made numerous public accusations against the Communist party and its members, becoming an almost professional anti-Communist witness and speaker. Testifying before the House Un-American Activities Committee, he identified Gerhardt Eisler as the secret head of the Communist party in the United States. Budenz then became a principal witness in several sensational trials against Communists, and he repeatedly supplied the FBI with so-called secret information.
He served as a government witness in deportation proceedings against Rumanian-born labor leader John Santo (1947), and in the trial in New York City of eleven leading Communists in 1949. In Washington, he testified in August 1948 before the House Un-American Activities Committee as it investigated charges against Alger Hiss.
In April 1950, he appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee to examine charges by Senator Joseph McCarthy that Communists had infiltrated the Department of State. He alleged that Owen Lattimore, who was then an adviser to the State Department on Far Eastern Affairs, was a member of a Communist cell. In August 1950, Budenz prepared for the House Un-American Activities Committee a list of 380 purported Communists in the United States. Besides revealing the names of alleged party members, Budenz was concerned with exposing the militant character of Communism and its goal of world domination.
In 1947, Budenz published an autobiographical account of his spiritual and political experiences, This Is My Story. New York World-Telegram critic Harry Hansen pronounced it to be "the most damaging evidence of the conspiratorial character of the American Communist party every published. " Lewis Gannett of the New York Herald Tribune thought the book lacked "perspective, " but that it had "sociopsychological significance and, at times, suspense" in its portrayal of a "troubled, genuinely altruistic if also ambitious man. "
In 1950, Budenz published Men Without Faces, another exposé of the alleged international Communist conspiracy. The book was called "disturbing" by the Christian Science Monitor review, "because it reveals the extent to which supposedly intelligent citizens have become mouthpieces of communism. " A self-proclaimed authority on Communism in the United States, Budenz contributed articles to Collier's, the American Legion Magazine, and other periodicals. In a series of nationwide lecture tours, he spoke before Catholic organizations, college audiences, and dozens of civic groups.
In August 1947, he gave five radio talks on "The Catholic Hour" on the subject of the Catholic church and labor, and in September of the same year, he lectured in Chicago at a rally of the Polish-American Congress.
He suffered a heart attack in 1962, and retired from the Fordham University faculty at about the same time. He spent the final decade of his life in relative obscurity at 196 Allison Avenue in Middletown, Rhode Island. His final book, The Bolshevik Invasion of the West, was published in 1965.
He died in Newport Hospital of a heart ailment after a long illness.
He grew up in the religious family. His father was a devout Catholic and a third-generation Indianan. As a young man, Louis was excommunicated from the Catholic church because he married a divorced woman.
Along with his wife and children, Budenz, who said he was returning to "the faith of my fathers, " was received into the Church at a ceremony at St. Patrick's Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, in New York City. "Reason and faith have led us to this happy step, " stated Budenz.
Politics
Budenz began as a labor activist and became a member of the Communist Party USA. He served on the national committee of the Communist party of the United States. Budenz's much-publicized resignation from the party and return to the Roman Catholic church came about through the efforts of Monsignor Fulton J. Sheen, an American prelate known for his regular radio broadcasts, who in 1940 issued a pamphlet, Communism: Answers to a Communist, directed largely as a response to Budenz's Communist writings. The monsignor later invited Budenz to his home to discuss Communism and Catholicism.
Later he became a vocal anti-Communist and as the anti-Communist craze waned in the 1960's, Budenz faded from public view.
Personality
Budenz was of medium height, of slight build, with thinning reddish hair, and was described as having a "crusader's gleam in his blue eyes" and "a machine-gun, staccato voice. "
Quotes from others about the person
At one point in the late 1940s he testified, according to one account, "that the fact that a man denied he was a Communist might prove he was a communist since all Communists had instructions to deny it. "
In 1952, Senator McCarthy praised Budenz for having "testified in practically every case in which Communists were either convicted or deported over the past three years; one of the key witnesses who testified against. .. Communist leaders. "
Connections
Louis Budenz was first married to a divorced woman, which caused him an exclusion from the Roman Catholic church. Budenz married Gizella Geiss in 1916 in Terre Haute, Indiana. Louis and Gizella adopted a daughter in 1919 named Louise (born in 1917). His second wife was Margaret Rodgers; they had four daughters: Julia, Josephine, Justine and Joanna.