Straight bought a red convertible in New York, and he and Simonds drove north to the Adirondack Mountains, to meet up with Roger Baldwin, the 53-year-old lawyer running the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). Straight's communist contacts had linked him up with Baldwin. Straight had offered to chauffeur him on a tour of the centers of unrest in the industrial midwest and to "help while he makes speeches to local civil liberties groups, " if he would let him and Simonds come with him.Straight was a trust fund baby. During the worst of the depression, he had more money than he knew what to do with. Perry relates how he told his Soviet handler he had ten grand laying around. He was told to give it to a Democrat running for congress from Texas (the guy lost despite Straight's money).His union would turn up wherever there was trouble to add comrade support to the communist controlled unions of the CIO . . .
The communist aim was first to unionized, then to disrupt in order to weaken the United State's industrial might. The long-term aim (a decade or more) was to have the union and political base so powerful that a communist revolution would be possible.
This was Straight's first observance of communist agitation and disruption in the United States. Later, he would make an art form of latching on to a respectable "liberal" front such as the ACLU and presenting himself as a concerned libertarian . . .,