Fascinating! What happened after he was reported to the HUAC?
After my grandfather was reported to HUAC, he of course lost the Democrat primary for his seat, and was investigated for years by the FBI. They interviewed all the neighbors, the members of his church and anyone else that knew him. They found nothing, but that didn’t stop them. My grandfather died a few years later of mesothelioma and the FBI attended his funeral to see if any communists showed up.
Oh, my grandmother was with my grandfather the day that he was run over and injured almost as badly. So, the guy got the president of the union and the president of the local WCTU at one shot.
There’s an author who had written a book about RCA, named Jefferson Cowie. The guy teachers labor relations at Cornell and his book is used as text at a lot of colleges that teach the history of labor unions.
I had an email correspondence with him, explaining where he went wrong. At first he tried to say that the reason that the CIOA didn’t want him to be president was because he was an extremely skilled worker. Then he asked me if I was insinuating that foul play was involved in my grandfather’s accident. I told him, no I wasn’t, but others had. You see my grandfather didn’t die when he was run over, that a battlefield trained surgeon at Cooper hospital had put him back together and rebuilt his legs with steel bars. Then I told him the rest. He never answered the last email. I’ve been thinking of forwarding the emails to the history dept of University of Penna because I’ve read that they use the book in one of their courses. I figure that they might be interested since they are so close to where RCA was located.