Field, Frederic Vanderbilt (1905-2000)

An American leftist political activist and an expert on Asia, who was a great-great-grandson of railroad tycoon Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt and a descendant of several other prestigious American families – as well as one of the top targets at the height of McCarthyism.

Frederic Vanderbilt Field was born on April 15, 1905 to the family of William B. Osgood Field (a descendant of Samuel Osgood, the first U.S Postmaster General, and Cyrus Field, who laid the first trans-Atlantic cable) and Lila Vanderbilt Sloane. In his autobiography, From Right to Left, (1983), ¹ Field described his childhood as a life of luxury – growing up ”surrounded by servants who did everything for him but sneeze.” After graduating from the Hotchkiss School in 1923, Field entered Harvard, where he eventually became president of The Harvard Crimson as well as a member or officer of a host of societies and clubs. He graduated from Harvard in 1927 and went to London for a postgraduate year at the London School of Economics. There, like many others before him, he was exposed to radical ideas under the influence of the socialist professor Harold Laski.

On his return to the United States in the summer of 1928, Field publicly proclaimed his adherence to the socialist cause by announcing his intention to vote for Norman Thomas, the U.S. Socialist Party’s presidential candidate. This declaration caused a stir in the press and the loss of an anticipated multi-million dollar inheritance from Frederick Vanderbilt, the great-uncle for whom he was named. [[2“Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Wealthy Leftist, Dies at 94,” by Enid Nemy, The New York Times, February 7, 2000.]] American Communists seized the opportunity to brand their rival socialists as “a party of professors and millionaires.”²

That same year, Field joined the American staff of the influential Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR) – a federation of 10 national councils which provided research on the Far East. Later, he became the Secretary of the American Council of the IPR. He remained with the IPR until 1940 and stayed on its board of trustees until 1947. In 1929, he briefly visited Moscow on his way to an IPR conference in Japan – but “didn’t meet anybody important” and in fact was “just in charge of the baggage,” as he put it. Before his return home, he gathered material for a book on Philippine emigration and traveled in the interior of China. ³ In 1932, he co-authored “two of the American Council’s most widely circulated pamphlets, Conflict in the Far East, 1931-1932 and Behind the Far Eastern Conflict.” ⁴

By the 1932 presidential campaign, Field had drifted leftward from the Socialist Party. In the fall of 1933, he became an editorial board member of China Today, a magazine published by a left-wing group, American Friends of the Chinese People, which was formed earlier that year. Field later appeared on the magazine masthead under a pseudonym. ⁵ During that period he was writing on Far Eastern affairs in publications including China Today. In 1937, he and a group of friends founded Amerasia magazine, which became a prestigious scholarly journal with many of the leading American Asia scholars on its board. Field served as Amerasia’s editorial board chairman until about 1940.

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Field became a financial donor to a number of left-wing causes and organizations. Decades later, he would estimate that since the 1930s he had given away about one third of his fortune. ⁶ In 1935, he begins to appear in Soviet diplomatic and cultural files as the Soviets’ source on Far Eastern affairs ⁷ – and particularly as an individual who was “generously donating money” to organizations serving the Soviet cause and enjoyed a reputation of being close to the Communist Party. ⁸

In 1940, following the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, Field became the executive secretary of the Communist-led American Peace Mobilization – an organization dedicated to keeping the United States from entering the war, which it denounced as an “imperialist war” on both sides. In the spring of 1941, Field organized a “perpetual” picket line around the White House, but ended it immediately when Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union on June 22 of that year. He later acknowledged his delusion: “Looking back, we made two serious mistakes. We misunderstood the nature of the war; it was a people’s war long before we realized it. And we had turned our propaganda too much on England and not enough on fascism.” ⁹ After America entered the war, Field tried to get a commission with Army intelligence as a Far Eastern expert, but he was rejected as a security risk. Rejection by the Army was reportedly a terrible blow to Field’s ego, and he made left-wing causes his full-time career thereafter. ¹⁰ He served on boards and donated to a number of organizations supporting the Communist and/or Soviet causes, like the National Council of Soviet-American Friendship, the Council for Pan-American Democracy, the Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy, the Council on African Affairs and the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. At the same time, he wrote for the Communist press. In April and May 1945, for instance, he was covering the United Nations Charter Conference in San Francisco for the CPUSA paper, the Daily Worker.

Although Field is often described as a CPUSA member, in Russian confidential correspondence from the 1930s to the early 1950s he appears not as a party member but only as someone close or “very close” to the party. A December 20, 1940 document filed in Comintern records unequivocally listed Field among “prominent Americans (non-Communists) who would write effective brochures explaining and defending the peace policy of the Soviet Union.” ¹¹ This situation did not change until the early 1950s. In one of his latest appearances in Russian “cultural” files, Field is described only as “one of the people close to the Party.” ¹² Neither do the available Russian records corroborate the description of Field as an agent of Soviet intelligence, particularly, an agent of Soviet military intelligence.

Trying to explain his political philosophy in a 1951 interview with Life magazine, Field spoke about his “deep convictions”: “I don’t feel I have to defend Russian Communism in all its acts. … I don’t think Communism in this country must take the form it takes in another – but I believe that in some form, we will have it here.” ¹³

Beginning in 1945, Field was under investigation by both FBI and congressional committees. In 1950, he was cited for contempt of Congress for the first time when he refused to answer questions, invoking the Fifth Amendment, but was acquitted. In 1951, he was convicted of contempt of court when, as secretary of the bailout fund of the Civil Rights Congress, he refused to reveal who had put up bond for four Communists who had jumped bail. Sentenced to 90 days in jail, he was subsequently released on bail.

Two years later, Field moved to Mexico, where he took up archaeology, among many other pursuits. He remained in Mexico until 1982, when he returned to the United States. He published his autobiography, From Right to Left, the following year. ¹⁴ He died in February 2000 at the age of 94.