Joseph Forer
Joseph Forer (1911 – 20 June 1986) was a 20th-century American attorney who, with partner David Rein, supported Progressive causes, including discriminated communists and African-Americans.
[5] Forer received his BA[6] and MA[7] from Rutgers University, where he excelled as a student and joined Phi Beta Kappa.
Hartley attacked Forer and colleagues for failing to grant pretrial conference and for appealing an adverse ruling.
"[43] In July 1947, Forer represented the FTA CIO against R.J. Reynolds before HUAC when two members pled the Fifth Amendment when asked to name communists.
[44] In September 1947 during his second appearance before HUAC, Gerhard Eisler asked to have Herman Greenberg and Joseph Forer represent him.
[45] On November 28, 1947, Forer, as acting chairman of the First Southeast Chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, charged that members of a Congress Heights Citizens Association had made "references to vigilantism and to possible use of violence" to keep African-Americans out of that section of town.
[48] On January 26–28 and February 2, 1948, a hearing of the House Education and Labor Subcommittee, chaired by U.S. Representative Clare E. Hoffman, occurred on the topic of a strike by United Cafeteria and Restaurant Workers (Local 471) and its parent, the United Public Workers of America (UPWA), CIO, against Government Services, Inc. (GSI), which had already lasted nearly a month.
[53] In April–June 1948, Forer supported partner David Rein and Abraham J. Isserman in defending Gerhard Eisler, accused of a violation of 52 Stat.
(Belford Lawson Jr. (1901-1985), co-founder of the New Negro Alliance (NNA), filed an amicus curiae for the National Lawyers Guild.
[57]) On May 20, 1948, Forer, as a representative of the National Lawyers Guild, "assailed the Mundt bill as a threat to civil liberties" during a meeting of the Washington, DC, committee of the Conference on Human Welfare.
Based on these, he drafted a report for the National Lawyers Guild's Special Committee to Study Certain Alleged Practices of the FBI.
In addition to Forer, contributors to the report were NLG president Clifford J. Durr, Frederick K. Beutel, Thomas I. Emmerson, O. John Rogge, James A. Cobb, and Robert J.
[66] On April 24, 1953, Forer represented William Frauenglass, an English teacher at the James Madison High School in Brooklyn, New York, before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Internal Security.
[67] Reading of the testimony, world-famous scientist Albert Einstein wrote Frauenglass a letter,[68] which reached The New York Times (Einstein had added a postscript stating the letter "need not remain confidential"), advising "every intellectual called before a Congressional investigating committee should refuse to testify, and 'must be prepared for jail and economic ruin, in short, for the sacrifice of his personal welfare in the interest of the cultural welfare of his country'.
[75] In 1961, Forer and Nathan Witt represented the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers in Robert F. Kennedy, Attorney General of the United States, Petitioner, v. International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Respondent before the Subversive Activities Control Board.
[citation needed] Regardless, Forer's research found that the U.S. Congress had jurisdiction over DC and so could overrule segregation; Charles H. Houston, dean of Howard University Law School concurred.
Specifically, Forer found that anti-segregation laws had passed and been enforced in the 1870s, including a case involving Harvey's Restaurant in 1874.
[2] The Washington Post recounted in 1985, "Four days after the Supreme Court ruled, Mary Terrell and the three other original complainants went back to Thompson's.
On April 7, 1965, the State of Maryland asked its court of appeal to deny the Giles brothers, represented by Forer, a new trial.
[85] Forer & Rein served the rights of striking workers, foreign-born aliens (with leftist leanings, e.g., Gerhard Eisler), and servicemen.
They won for the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship the right to contest in court its designation by the attorney general as a "subversive organization.
In 1977, a release of internal memos of the FBI revealed, according to The Washington Post, that: An Oct. 4, 1951 memo to Hoover said that a search of trash at the Washington offices of guild lawyers Joseph Forer and David Rein had uncovered a draft resolution urging President Truman to authorize a citizens' investigation of the FBI because of its alleged excesses in loyalty checks.
[2][4][43] On June 9, 1979, the Washington, DC, chapter of the National Lawyers Guild held an evening event to celebrate his career.
[98] Forer, Rein, and many friends and associates lived at Trenton Terrace, 950 Mississippi Avenue SE, Washington DC 20032.
[85] The Bancroft Library at the University of California/Berkeley houses papers of Forer along with other members (Osmond K. Fraenkel, Carol Weiss King, Samuel Neuburger, David Freedman, Justine Wise Polier, Jeremiah Gutman, Martin Popper, Abraham Isserman, Dennis Roberts, Robert J. Silberstein, Justice Raymond Peters, and George W. Crockett, Jr.) of the National Lawyers Guild and its predecessor, the International Juridical Association.
As historian Joan Quigley describes: In the late 1940s, while Congress and the executive branch trawled for evidence of disloyalty and subversion, Rein and Forer immersed themselves in difficult and disfavored causes: opposing the Mundt-Nixon Bill; defending labor unions and alleged Communists; upholding the Bill of Rights.
He had defended people accused of communist sympathies before Eastland's Internal Security Subcommittee on several occasions ...[101] Historian Marvin Caplan[102] wrote: When a staff attorney at a HUAC hearing asked Joe Forer how many times he had appeared before the committee, Forer couldn't remember.
