[4] (During the Great Depression, founder Thomas Chadbourne asserted that the capitalist system itself was "on trial" and became an early champion of both collective bargaining rights and profit sharing for workers.

The New Dealers saw the AAA as complementing the National Recovery Act (NRA – where fellow Ware Group member and lifelong Hiss friend Henry Collins worked).

[2] A joint resolution dated January 21, 1935,[17] called the Emergency Relief Appropriation Act of 1935, passed in the United States Congress and became law on April 8, 1935.

[24]) In his role as the CIO's general counsel, Pressman was influential in helping to stop the attempt to deport Communist Longshoreman's Union official Harry Bridges.

This decision came in response particularly from Philip Murray and Sidney Hillman, the CIO's two vice presidents, that pre-dated the Hitler-Stalin Pact (announced the previous month).

[35] orIn his speech, Pressman said: On pretexts of economy, more money for war purposes and similar catch cries, the reactionary financial interests and their political henchmen hope to reduce appropriations for the unemployed and for publish works, to emasculate labor and social legislation, and to restrict our civil liberties.

Later in June 1941, at a convention of the National Lawyers Guild in Chicago, Pressman criticized the Vinson and Ball bills before the US Congress, both of which he accused of a "long-range" plan whose aims included "destruction of workers' rights to organize, bargain collectively, and strike"; "destruction of labor organizations as the barrier to unchecked monopoly profits"; and "complete control of the national economy and the government by big business.

In February 1940, he held a "heated exchange" with US Representative Clare Hatch during a hearing of the US House Labor Committee, again on the issue of amendments to the NRLA (Wagner Act): Pressman: I'll answer the question all right, Mr. Hoffman.

[40] In July 1943, the CIO formed a political action committee, the "CIO-PAC," chaired by Sidney Hillman, and supported by Pressman and John Abt as co-counsels.

The six-person board consisted of David L. Cole and Nathan P. Feisinger for the government, Philip Murry of the CIO with Pressman as counsel for unions, John Stevens with Chester McLain of U.S. Steel for industry.

During formation of the WFTU and in working with pro-Soviet American unions, "the active role played by" Pressman "in writing and rewriting convention resolutions helped to smooth possible conflicts.

[1][48] In July 1946, at a National Lawyers Guild convention in Cleveland, he attacked the "fallacious notion that increased wages in the interests of adequate purchasing power necessarily bring higher prices."

[52] In June 1947, Pressman also wrote an influential critique of the Taft-Hartley Act, used by President Harry S. Truman as background material to justify his "bristling" veto of the measure.

On July 4, the Washington Post's Drew Pearson noted "There've been considerable charges and counter-charges that CIO Counsel Lee Pressman ghost-wrote the hot White House veto message on the Taft-Hartley labor bill.

[1] In August 1947, Pressman and Reid Robinson called for a third party to support Henry A. Wallace for U.S. President during a convention of the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers ("a Communist-dominated union").

[56] In late 1947, Meyer Bernstein of the United Steel Workers of America wrote as an anti-communist against Pressman (amidst a rising tide led by Walter Reuther against pro-communists in the CIO).

On February 4, 1948, Pressman was "fired from his $19,000 job as CIO general counsel, reportedly as a byproduct of a factional struggle within the federation in which anti-Communist labor leader Walter Reuther emerged triumphant.

The thousand-member Associated Fur Coat and Trimming Manufacturers, Inc., had asked for a return to pre-WWII two-season wage scheme plus compliance with affidavits from non-communist union leaders per the Taft-Hartley Act.

[22]On May 19, 1948, Securities and Exchange Commission official Anthon H. Lund accused Pressman of interfering in a lawsuit filed against the Kaiser-Frazer car manufacturing company in a Federal District Court in New York City.

He specified that between February 3 and 9, 1948, Harold J. Ruttenberg, vice president of the Portsmouth Steel Corporation, had contacted Pressman for advice on "how to go about filing a stockholder's suite against Kaiser-Frazer.

Rather, he promoted the "circular" spectrum of DeWitt Clinton Poole, in which Fascism and Nazism would meet at the circle's bottom with Soviet Communism (Leninism, Stalinism).

Instead of backing the Non-Communist Left as the group in Europe closest to the American progressive faith in combining freedom· and planning, the CIO, for example, maintained a disturbing silence over foreign affairs; and altogether too many liberals followed Communist cues in rejoicing at every Soviet triumph and at every Socialist discomfiture.

In fact, when his former AAA boss Rexford Tugwell joined the Progressive Party campaign in early 1948, "he did so on condition that Lee Pressman would serve as its secretary.

[1][95] In 1936–1937, Chambers put Pressman in touch with Philip Rosenbliett and "Mack Moren" to travel to Mexico and buy arms for "J. Eckhart," a representative of the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War.

By using Chambers, he claimed, HUAC sought to achieve three objectives: distract Americans from "the real issues" (civil rights, inflation, housing, Israel, and repeal of the Taft-Hartley Act), smear FDR's New Deal officials, and discredit Henry Wallace and his associates.

"[97] On August 20, 1948, in testimony under subpoena before the HUAC, Pressman declined to answer questions regarding Communist Party membership, citing grounds of potential self-incrimination.

[100] Although he made no mention of having himself conducted intelligence-gathering activities, his 1950 testimony provided the first corroboration of Chambers' allegation that a Washington, D.C., communist group around Ware existed, with federal officials Nathan Witt, John Abt and Charles Kramer named as members of this party cell.

This week ... he reluctantly consented to name three men who had been fellow Communists in the '30s—John Abt, Nathan Witt and Charles Kramer...[98]On June 28, 1931, Pressman married the former Sophia Platnik.

"[7] In 1946, VENONA reveals that Pressman hosted Mikhail Vavilov, first secretary in the Soviet embassy, at his home in Washington, D.C., where he met fellow (former) Ware Group member Charles Kramer.

Working in Soviet intelligence archives in the middle 1990s, Russian journalist Alexander Vassiliev discovered that Pressman, codenamed "Vig", had told only fragments of the truth to Congressional inquisitors in 1950.