[1] Graduating in 1927, Field spent a year at the London School of Economics, where he was exposed to the ideas of Harold Laski, the Fabian socialist political theorist, economist, and writer.
Having attracted significant attention as an unlikely endorsement for Norman Thomas, Field was cut off without a penny by Frederick William Vanderbilt, his great-uncle, from whom he had been promised an estimated fortune of more than $70 million.
He described the IPR as "a bourgeois research-educational organization" funded by the Rockefeller and Carnegie foundations and some of the biggest corporations in the US, which he claimed subsidized his publication of proposals "as anticapitalistic as the articles he wrote for The New Masses and The Daily Worker.
[7] He wrote a memo cautioning Owen Lattimore, editor of the IPR quarterly Pacific Affairs, with regard to a certain article that "the analysis is a straight Marxist one and... should not be altered.
"Some time before the APM was formally organized," wrote Field, "Earl Browder asked me if I would accept the executive secretaryship if it were offered me.
"[2] At APM, Field emerged as a committed pacifist, demanding that the United States stay out of the war in Europe, at least while the Hitler-Stalin pact lasted.
[13] His reasoning, as he would explain in his autobiography, was that "the European war in those early stages was one between rival imperialists, the British Empire and the Nazi Reich.
According to the McCarran Committee's IPR Report, Lattimore, along with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's Administrative Assistant Lauchlin Currie (identified in the Venona decrypts as the Soviets' White House source codenamed "Page"),[16] tried in 1942 to get Field a commission in military intelligence,[17] but, unlike Duncan Lee (Venona code name "Koch"), Maurice Halperin ("Hare"), Julius Joseph ("Cautious"),[18] Carl Marzani, Franz Neumann ("Ruff"),[19] Helen Tenney ("Muse"), and Donald Wheeler ("Izra"), all of whom got into the OSS, Field was rejected as a security risk.
[21] Also present, she alleged, were Browder, John Hazard Reynolds, head of the United States Service and Shipping Corporation (a Comintern front organization for Soviet espionage activities)[22] and "Ray" Elson (Identified in the "Gorsky memo" under the cover name "Irma")[23] In 1945 Field was one of the founding members of the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, which tried to influence US policy to stop supporting the Kuomintang government in China, and after 1949 to recognize the People's Republic of China.
[24] On April 22, 1948, Louis Budenz, former managing editor of the Daily Worker, advised FBI investigators, "Field is a Communist Party member.
The organization concentrated on legal action and political protest, notably publicizing the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old boy Emmett Till and publishing the 1951 document We Charge Genocide.
[30] The following year, former Soviet spy Whittaker Chambers testified before the McCarran Committee that NKVD "handler" J. Peters told him, in 1937, that Field was a member of the Communist underground.
Yet, writers Kai Bird and Svetlana Chervonnaya, examining the archives in an article of The American Scholar, disagree: Documents show that he was in contact with various Soviet representatives in the United States beginning in early 1935.
Convicted of contempt of court since he would not provide the names of any of his Communist friends, Field served two months of a 90-day sentence in federal prison at Ashland, Kentucky, in 1951.