Canwell, state’s anti-communist crusader, dies at 95

Associated Press

SPOKANE — Former state Rep. Albert F. Canwell, whose anti-communist crusade presaged the congressional Army-McCarthy hearings of the early 1950s, is dead at 95.

Canwell, whose hearings into accusations of communist activity at the University of Washington in 1948 were the first of their kind to receive national publicity, died Monday after years of increasing physical frailty.

Despite attacks ranging from witch hunting to evidence tampering, he never repented his handling of the issue, which cost three professors their jobs and remains a watershed event in Washington state history.

"There was no time that we went overboard. I didn’t accuse anybody who wasn’t guilty as hell," Canwell said in 1998. "I think they got what they deserved — me."

A lifelong Spokane resident, Canwell did work ranging from farm labor to journalism. As a Spokane County sheriff’s deputy, he began keeping files on suspected communists.

Backed by Ashley Holden, political editor of the Spokane Spokesman-Review, Canwell was elected to the state House of Representatives as a Republican in 1946 and gained approval to form the Joint Legislative Committee on UnAmerican Activities, soon known as the Canwell Committee.

The panel’s raucous five-day hearing at the cavernous Seattle Armory in 1948 proved a blueprint for hearings by the late Sen. Joseph McCarthy, R-Wis., that began in Washington, D.C., in 1950, and in many other state legislatures during the early years of the Cold War.

With flashbulbs popping and Washington State Patrol troopers standing guard, the committee aired accusations that 150 faculty members at the state’s largest university were communists or communist sympathizers.

Professors and their lawyers were denied the right to cross-examine witnesses. Six faculty members testified they had been Communist Party members, seven refused to answer questions of political affiliation and two denied being members.

Three were fired by the Board of Regents under intense pressure from Canwell and his committee, and a leading off-campus professional theater, The Playhouse, was evicted from its rental quarters and closed.

Harvard Law School professor Vern Countryman later wrote that the hearings and other committee proceedings were "clearly more subversive of established legal processes than any activities disclosed by the committee’s investigation."

Canwell ran unsuccessfully for the state Senate in 1948, the U.S. Senate in 1950 and the U.S. House in 1952 and 1954, then ran a private security business and bookstore. For the rest of his life he collected information on people he considered communists.

His account of the hearings is one of the most frequently requested manuscripts in an oral history program operated by the state secretary of state’s office.

"All Powers Necessary and Convenient," a play depicting the Canwell Committee that was produced at the university for the 50th anniversary of the hearings four years ago, is being given staged readings at a theater and humanities conference in Seattle this week.

Ed Guthman, a Seattle Times reporter, won the Pulitzer Prize for articles in 1949 that vindicated Mel Rader. Canwell dismissed the Times story as "phony."

Guthman uncovered documents showing Rader could not have attended Communist Party meetings in New York at the time a Canwell Committee witness testified having seen him there. A resort owner said other exonerating documents were given to the Canwell Committee and showed Guthman a signed receipt, but Canwell denied ever seeing them.

Guthman went on to become Robert F. Kennedy’s press secretary, national editor of the Los Angeles Times and editorial editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer.

William L. Dwyer, who covered the hearings as a student for the UW Daily, the campus newspaper, cited it as a formative event in his career as a leading trial lawyer and nationally respected federal judge.

Dwyer, who died in February, won his first big case in 1963 with a libel verdict that cleared the name of state Sen. John Goldmark, a rancher accused of communism by Canwell and Holden, who by then was partially retired and running the Tonasket Tribune.

Red-baiting accusations against Dwyer, in turn, figured in an 18-month delay by the Reagan administration in nominating him to the federal bench in 1987.

Dwyer was championed by former Sen. Slade Gorton, a Republican, who subsequently made a vote-trading deal on federal judgeships that loomed large when Gorton lost a re-election bid to Democrat Brock Adams in 1988.

On Christmas Eve, 1985, one of Goldmark’s sons, Charles Goldmark, and the younger Goldmark’s wife and two children were killed at their home in Seattle by a mentally troubled man who falsely believed Charles Goldmark was a communist.

Through it all, Canwell maintained in 1998, "I did the job they way I think I’d do it again."

Survivors include Canwell’s children, Lynne Schulz, Christina Weaver, Marshall Canwell, Stephanie Benagiano, Jon Canwell and Geneve Meyer, 14 grandchildren and four great-grandchildren.