John Herrmann
John Theodore Herrmann was born in Lansing, Michigan in 1900. He was the son of a German immigrant family. [1]He lived in Paris in the 1920s, part of the famous expatriate American writers' circle there, when he met his first wife Josephine Herbst. Herrmann's family were tailors in Lansing, and would send Herrmann suits in Paris, which he would then often give to writers, including Ernest Hemingway.[2]
Josephine enjoyed more success as a writer than her husband. John scraped by as an “author and petition writer,” and as a minor party functionary. The couple lived a few years in rural Pennsylvania, and were friends with Katherine Anne Porter, who had lived in Mexico for a time in the 1920s. They divorced in the early 1930s, and he went to work for the New Deal administration of Franklin Roosevelt in 1934.
Herrmann became part of the Ware group, a Washington D.C. based secret apparatus of the CPUSA and Comintern and functioned as a courier to carry classified information to Soviet intelligence. Hermann worked within the Agricultural Adjustment Administration.
From early 1934 until the summer of 1935 Herrmann was a paid courier for the CPUSA whose job was to deliver to New York material emanating from the secret cells of sympathetic government employees being cultivated by Hal Ware. Herrmann introduced Whittaker Chambers to Alger Hiss at a Dupont Circle Chinese restaurant in 1934, according to Herbst's biographer in 1984.
By 1940 he was living alone on a houseboat, the Cheerio, near New Orleans’s Bourbon street. Then, at age 41 he enlisted in the Coast Guard, serving until war’s end.
He remarried to Ruth Peck, began to restructure his life, but then fled to Mexico fearing arrest because of his contacts with Alger Hiss who was being investigated for espionage. John became part of the American-left’s expatriate colony in Mexico ling as a “tourist writer.”
He applied in March 1949 to Mexico City College as a speech and drama major. He attended for only two quarters, Fall 1950 and Winter 1951. A photograph in the Nov. 16, 1950 issue of M.C.C.'s student paper, the Collegian, shows Earl Sennett speaking to twelve students in his "Studio Stages" drama group; among them are Frank Jeffries, Alice Hartman, and John Herrmann.
The Ware group's activities were investigated in the late 1940s by the House Un-American Activities Committee, and Herrmann was monitored and questioned many times in Mexico by the FBI in connection with the HUAC inquiries, but never arrested. He died near the Pacific Ocean in April 1959, at the Hotel Navidad, in Barra de Navidad, Jalisco, from chronic alcoholism. His body was sent to, and he was buried in, his hometown of Lansing, Michigan.[3]
In 1984, a biographer of Herrmann's ex-wife Josephine Herbst, Elinor Langer, revealed that Herbst had disclosed to her that her spouse Herrmann introduced Chambers to Alger Hiss at a Chinese restaurant near Dupont Circle in 1934.[4] Herrmann died in 1959, and Herbst in 1969. This statement, if true, undercuts a significant portion of Hiss' testimony before Congress.
Herrmann's novel "Foreign Born", written in the mid-1920's and found in archives at the University of Texas Austin, was published in 2018.
Books by John Hermann
- What Happens (1928)
- Summer is Ended (1932)
- The Salesman (1939)
- Foreign Born (2018)
Sources
- Stephen Koch, Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West (Free Press; 1994) ISBN 0-02-918730-3
- The death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs
References
- ↑ "Novel Recounts German Backlash in Lansing," Lansing State Journal, November 11, 2018, P. A13| https://www.newspapers.com/image/505827053/
- ↑ "Forgotten Novelist Gets his Due 89 Years Later", Lansing State Journal, June 11, 2015, P. A5 |https://www.newspapers.com/image/109043509/
- ↑ https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/234129114/john-theodore-herrmann
- ↑ "Book Touches off New Controversy in Hiss Case", by Joseph Berger, The Roanoke Times, September 13, 1984, Page 63 | https://www.newspapers.com/image/919070242/
