Maurice Braverman
Maurice Braverman (1916–2002) was a 20th-century American civil rights lawyer and some-time Communist Party member (and Party lawyer) who was convicted in 1952 under the Smith Act, served 28 of 36 months, then immediately faced disbarment, against which he fought in the 1970s and won reinstatement in Maryland (1974) and federal courts (1975).
[1][2][3] Maurice Louis Braverman was born to a Jewish family in Washington, DC, on February 1, 1916.
(During law school, study of the Sacco & Vanzetti case aroused "civil libertarian feelings.
"[5] A 1940 census shows Maurice Braverman, 31, white male American, residing in Brooklyn Assembly District 2.
[3] On October 7, 1941, Braverman passed the Maryland Bar and opened on his own office in Baltimore, where he would practice law for the next eleven years.
[1][8][3] In 1943, he joined the Communist Party due to his anti-fascism and the fact that the USSR was by that time a member of the Allied Forces in World War II.
[9] On August 26, 1948, Braverman appeared as counsel for Mr. and Mrs. William Rosen, involved in the sale of a Ford automobile once belonging to Alger Hiss during House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) hearings that were following the allegations of Elizabeth Bentley and Whittaker Chambers.
When Mrs. Rosen continued to refuse to answer questions by pleading the Fifth Amendment, the committee again turned on Braverman: The Chairman: Mr.
Once on the stand as witness and his background discussed, Braverman found himself accused of Communism: Mr. Stripling: Are you a member of the Communist Party?
In 1950, Braverman's name and address (15 South Gay Street, Baltimore) appeared in a HUAC investigative report, showing him as a member of the National Lawyers Guild.
On July 11, 1951, Mary Stalcup Markward, an FBI undercover agent in the Communist Party, testified.
As historian Vern Pederson has noted, "The six arrests were part of the Justice Department's Smith Act prosecution of local, 'second string' Party leaders from California, Pennsylvania, and Hawaii as well as Maryland."
All six posted bail; FBI agents followed them around the clock, seven days a week–even sitting next to them in movies and calling them cabs home.
Harold Buchman represented the six; United States Attorney for the District of Maryland Bernard J. Flynn prosecuted.
They typically called his wife's place of work every few weeks for no apparent reason [implied: intimidation].
He joined other groups: the New Democratic Coalition, St. John's Council on Criminal Justice, and the Baltimore Free University.
He asked the Maryland chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for help; they agreed.
On April 9, 1976, C. Christopher Brown and Harold P. Dwin of Baltimore argued Braverman's case, with the National Lawyers Guild as amicus curiae (Doron Weinberg, Joseph Forer, and David Rein).
Braverman attributed his arrest and conviction to his calling FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover a "fag" on a tapped telephone line.
[1] From at least 1953 through 1972, the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of the Attorney General noted the existence of a "Maurice Braverman Defense Committee."
12831, the Attorney General, by counsel, petitions this Board for a determination that the Maurice Braverman Defense Committee has ceased to exist...
The party focused its recruiting on companies with many blue-collar workers... Often, national leaders such as Earl Browder and William Z.
The party held rallies... and fielded candidates in local elections... After World War II... most of Baltimore's communists went underground.
One Evening Sun headline of the time: "FBI Informer Calls Meyers Key State Red."
Postwar prosperity and ideological differences with Soviet communism proved too much for Baltimore's communists, and the local party all but disappeared...1970s, and winning restatement in Maryland (1974) and federal courts (1975).
After the article "Suspecting Alger Hiss" appeared in the New York Review of Books on April 20, 1978,[24] Braverman spoke to its author, Garry Wills.
(Wills, formerly a writer for William F. Buckley, Jr.'s magazine National Review, had expressed disbelief in Hiss's innocence, calling him a "man drab with the proper virtues," yet often found "telling odd little needless lies, or suffering inexplicable 'blackouts' of memory.)
Calling himself a "civil rights lawyer," Braverman explained that he had served time in the Lewisburg prion with Alger Hiss.
When the two met there, Braverman introduced himself as counsel to William Rosen in August 1948, to which Hiss replied curtly, "I know."
Wills notes that most innocent people would have expressed great interest in talking to someone who might have details in helping their case.
