[2] Oppenheimer biographers Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin have claimed that he was the "most highly paid" informer for the Justice Department in 1951–1952.
[4] While stationed in Hawaii, he formed a Hawaiian Communist League (1924–1927) with 75 other soldiers and supported a local strike on a sugar plantation.
[2] Crouch contacted Upton Sinclair, who gained support from the Daily Worker newspaper and the International Labor Defense (ILD), both affiliates of the nascent Communist Party.
Thanks to the efforts of ILD lawyer Austin Lewis, Crouch served another 24 months in Alcatraz on a commuted three-year sentence.
In Moscow, he met Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Lenin's wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Klara Zetkin, and "Big" Bill Haywood.
Foster and Benjamin Gitlow, Crouch toured the South but found little support except in North Carolina.
[4] During five years as a paid government informer, he testified regarding Robert Oppenheimer, Harry Bridges,[1] Charlie Chaplin, William Remington,[5] Milton A. Abernethy, and many others as Communists.
However, he did not know Isaac Folkoff or William Edward Crane (AKA Irving Keith), people in one of Chambers’ earlier networks.
In June, 1954, affidavits accusing Crouch of multiple cases of perjury were filed which led to the overturning of the deportation order against Pulitzer-prize winning political cartoonist, Jacob Burck.
At his death, one of the people whom he had accused wrote: In his testimony before the Courts, Congressional Committees, and Loyalty Boards, Crouch did just what he was hired to do and, whatever may be said about him, he gave his employers full value of what they wanted of him.
His very death was a final act of service to his hirers, for by it he became purged of his evil doing and they, of their responsibility for using him, for of the dead we should speak only good.
Our Attorney General will now be spared the embarrassment of answering questions about the progress of his long delayed "study" of Crouch's conflicting testimony or about what is being done to right the wrongs done his victims.