Juliet Poyntz
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Juliet Stuart Poyntz (November 25, 1886–1937?) was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and a founding member of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).
[edit] Biography
Poyntz was born in Omaha, Nebraska and moved to New York City as a young adult, where she earned degrees at Barnard College and Columbia University. She subsequently studied at the University of Oxford and the London School of Economics before lecturing in the History Department at Columbia. She joined the Socialist Party of America in 1909 and began working in the labor reform movement after leaving Columbia in 1913. She was instrumental in labor-Left reform organisations such as U.S Immigration Commission, The American Association for Labor Legislation and the Rand School of Social Science. She was employed by the International Ladies Garment Workers Union as director of the union's Worker's University. Poyntz continued to work within the Socialist-oriented ILGWU after siding with the fledgling CPUSA. During the 1920's Poyntz was on the staff of the Friends of the Soviet Union and International Labor Defense. She quit her outside work in favor of internal party activities during the "Third Period". In 1934 she dropped out of open party activities and allegedly began performing underground party work for Soviet military intelligence (GRU).
[edit] Disappearance
Poyntz disappeared after leaving the Women's Club in New York City on June 3, 1937 (Gary Kern, A Death in Washington, p. 163). Police investigation turned up no clues to her fate. In early 1938 Carlo Tresca, a leading Italian-American anarchist, publicly accused the Soviets of kidnapping Poyntz in order to prevent her defection. He said that before she disappeared, she had come to him to talk over her disgust at what she had seen in Moscow in 1936 in the early stages of Joseph Stalin's Great Purge.
Whittaker Chambers said he heard Poyntz had been killed for attempted desertion, and this rumor contributed to his caution when he defected in 1938. Elizabeth Bentley stated she was told by Jacob Golos in the late 1930s, and later by KGB officer Anatoli Gromov in 1945 that Poyntz had been a traitor and was now dead. Both Chambers's and Bentley's defection were probably in part motivated by fear of the example set in the Juliet Poyntz case.
[edit] Sources
- McKillen, Elizabeth (1998). "Poyntz, Juliet Stuart". Encyclopedia of the American Left (2nd edition). Oxford University Press. 631 - 632. ISBN 0-19-512088-4.
- McKillen, Elizabeth (Winter 1982). "The Culture of Resistance: Female Institution Building in the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, 1905 - 1925". Michigan Occasional Papers in Women's Studies.
- Tresca, Carlo (March 1938). "Where is Juliet Stuart Poyntz?". Modern Monthly 10.
- Haynes, John Earl and Klehr, Harvey (2000). Venona: Decoding Soviet Espionage in America. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-08462-5.
- Olmsted, Kathryn S. (2002). Red Spy Queen: A Biography of Elizabeth Bentley. The University of North Carolina Press. ISBN 0-8078-2739-8.
