- John Herrmann
John Theodore Herrmann was the person who introduced
Whittaker Chambers toAlger Hiss .Biography
He was born in
Lansing, Michigan in 1900. He lived inParis in the 1920s, as part of its famous expatriate American writers' circle, when he met his first wife,Josephine Herbst . Herbst enjoyed more success as a writer than Herrmann; the couple lived a few years in ruralPennsylvania , and were friends withKatherine Anne Porter . They divorced in the early 1930s, and he went to work for theNew Deal administration ofFranklin Roosevelt in 1934. He became part of the Ware group, a Washington D.C. based secret apparatus of theCPUSA andComintern which supplied classified information to Soviet intelligence. Hermann worked within theAgricultural Adjustment Administration .From early 1934 until the summer of 1935, Herrmann was a paid courier for the CPUSA whose job it was to deliver material to
New York emanating from the secret cells of sympathetic government employees being cultivated by Hal Ware. Herrmann introducedWhittaker Chambers toAlger Hiss . [Elinor Langer, "The Secret Drawer," [http://www.thenation.com "The Nation"] , May 30, 1994, p. 756] [Elinor Langer, "Josephine Herbst" (Boston: Little, Brown, 1984) ISBN 978-0446328531]Herrmann remarried, to Ruth Tate, and after serving during
World War II in theUnited States Coast Guard atNew Orleans , he went toMexico and applied in March 1949 toMexico City College as a speech and drama major. He attended for only two quarters, Fall 1950 and Winter 1951. A photograph in the Nov. 16, 1950 issue of M.C.C.'s student paper, the "Collegian", shows Earl Sennett speaking to twelve students in his "Studio Stages" drama group; among them are Frank Jeffries, Alice Hartman, and John Herrmann.The Ware group's activities were investigated in the late 1940s by the
House Un-American Activities Committee , and Herrmann was placed under surveillance and questioned many times in Mexico by theFBI in connection with the HUAC inquiries, but never arrested. He died near thePacific Ocean in April 1959, at the "Hotel Navidad", in Barra de Navidad,Jalisco , Mexico from chronic alcoholism.Books by John Herrmann
*"What Happens" (1928)
*"Summer is Ended" (1932)
*"The Salesman" (1939)Notes
References
* Stephen Koch, "Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West" (Free Press; 1994) ISBN 0-02-918730-3
* [http://www.google.com/url?sa=U&start=8&q=http://lawrence.com/burroughs/deathofjoan29-42.pdf&e=9711 The death of Joan Vollmer Burroughs]
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