During his tenure as president, the Central Trades and Labor Council expelled the TU (and the ILGWU, as Hendley pointed out during testimony in 1952).
After retirement, Hendley served on TU's Executive Board, on its Educational Policies Committee, and as director of the Teachers Union Institute.
[1][2][3] In 1946, Hendley became a field representative of the National Teachers Division of the United Public Workers of America (UPWA/CIO) through 1948.
[1][6] (During committee hearings, former TU member Benjamin Mandel and professor Sidney Hook both testified that Hendely was a puppet of the Communist Party.
[6]) In 1952, as former TU president and current Secretary-Treasurer (and stockholder) of Publishers New Press, he was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and refused to answer many questions.
His attorneys were Harold Cammer (one-time partner of Lee Pressman and Nathan Witt of the Ware Group led by Whittaker Chambers) and Royal W. France.
He conceded that the board of directors of the Publishers New Press controlled the editorial policy of the Daily Worker.
The committee cited an article from the Daily Worker to list the board of directors of the Publishers New Press as of October 8, 1951: Hendley, Joseph Dermer (Furriers), Howard Fast (writer), Richard O. Boyer (writer), Arnold Donawa (dentist), Ulysses Campbell (dentist), Elliot White (clergyman), Helen Alfred (social worker), Vincent Provinzano (Furriers), and Alex Kolkin (ILGWU).
Of Bella Dodd's assertion that Hendley's TU secretary Dorothy Wallace was TU vice president Dale Zysman's sister, Hendley first state "I think that is a fiction of Bella Dodd's imagination" and then stated "To my knowledge, she is not a sister of Dale Zysman...
[1] In 1952, Bella Dodd characterized Hendley as "a person with very definite views on the whole question of schools and socialists.