John Goldmark
[1][6] At the time of their courtship she had been a member of the American Communist Party since 1935, paying dues and attending study groups, but Goldmark was averse to the organization and she later stated that she resigned her membership in 1943, the year after they married.
[1][9] In the spring of the following year, the family moved to Okanogan County, where Goldmark bought a 500-acre (200 ha) wheat and cattle ranch on the Colville Indian Reservation, 250 miles (400 km) northeast of Seattle.
[1][5][6][10] The family briefly encountered issues with Ringe's past – she was questioned in 1949 by two Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) agents about her experiences in the Communist Party and in 1956, she was subpoenaed to testify at a Seattle hearing of the United States House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) – but they believed those concerns were behind them.
[1][13] He served on the Rural Electrification Board in the 1950s, where he pushed for public hydropower using the recently constructed Grand Coulee Dam, as electricity was controlled by the Washington Water Power Company, which charged higher prices than most farmers could afford.
He served a total of six years in the legislature, where he was actively involved with budget and tax issues and argued in favor of public electrical power.
Prior to the 1962 election, the anti-communism movement had begun to grow locally, with the formation of the Okanogan County Anti-Communism League in 1961, led by Loris Gillespie, a businessman and former county Republican chair, and Don Caron, state coordinator of the John Birch Society who had become a cause célèbre for quitting his job with the U.S. Forest Service when they asked him to stop running his anti-communist column in the Okanogan Independent.
[23] The renewed efforts were spearheaded by Ashley Holden, a former editor for The Spokesman-Review and fervent opponent of public power, and Albert F. Canwell, a former Republican legislator and head of the state Un-American Activities Committee.
[24][2] After leaving office, Canwell established the "American Intelligence Service", through which he maintained files on local figures he suspected of communism and published this information in his newsletter The Vigilante.
[1][19][26] When the primary campaign kicked-off in July, articles began to appear which named Goldmark, claiming that he intended to repeal the McCarran Act, that his wife had known Alger Hiss and that he would not salute the American flag.
[1] The event was summarised by Holden in the Tonasket Tribune, where he also wrote an editorial claiming that Goldmark was "a tool of a monstrous conspiracy" and "the idol of the Pinkos and ultra-liberals who infest every session of the legislature".
[1] Three weeks into the trial, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, prompting concerns by the claimants that the verdict could be affected by rumors that his killer was a Marxist.
[1] The accusations extended to their son, Charles, who attended Reed College which had recently hosted a talk by Gus Hall, a Communist Party secretary.
[36] The claimants called witnesses who included actor Sterling Hayden, writer Paul Jacobs, senator Harry P. Cain, state representative Slade Gorton and their elder son.
[1][7][37][38] The trial lasted 43 days and ended with the defendants' attorneys arguing in their closing statement that there was not a conspiracy to defame Goldmark and they had simply been campaigning against an elected official.
[1] In his closing statement, defense attorney Joseph Wicks compared communism to an infection, similar to a dog with rabies, and asked how a communist could believe in God, causing the religious Ringe to leave the courtroom in tears.
[1] The verdict made national headlines, receiving favorable coverage in newspapers including The Portland Oregonian, The Washington Post and Time magazine.
The defendants considered this a victory, with Canwell describing Ringe as a lesbian communist, but Goldmark chose not to appeal the decision and request a new trial as his concern was proving the charges were false, which had been accomplished.
[1][18] Rice believed that he was fighting a war against communism and he had heard through a meeting of the local chapter of the Duck Club, an anti-Semitic and anti-communist organization, that the Goldmarks were communists.
[1] Rice's lawyers would claim at trial that he had confused Charles for his father, whom the founder of the Seattle chapter of the Duck Club, Homer Brand, had described as the regional director of the Communist Party.
