Abt, John J.

ABT, JOHN J. (1904–1991). For most of his adult life, John J. Abt was chief counsel for several radical movements, the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America, and the Communist Party, USA. He like to joke that, although he was born on May Day, his origins were anything but proletariat.
Abt was raised in an affluent German-Jewish household in Chicago’s “Freud Hill” neighborhood. His grandparents were founders of Hart, Abt and Marx (which became Hart, Schaffner and Marx), the huge men’s clothing manufacturer. An uncle, Isaac Abt, was the city’s preeminent pediatrician. Abt’s father became the chief negotiator for the clothing industry in its battle to prevent the emerging garment workers’ union, under Sidney Hillman, from making inroads.

Educated at the University of Chicago—where he received his law degree at the age of twenty—Abt first turned to corporate law. He would later remark that his first three years of practice were devoted to floating bond issues that, after the Depression hit, he would have to foreclose.

When Franklin Roosevelt was elected president, Abt went to Washington to join the New Deal with his sister, Marion Bachrach. He was hired by Jerome Frank, for whose firm he had worked in Chicago, in the legal division of the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). A number of his AAA colleagues had joined the Communist Party, and they soon recruited Abt. Their membership was secret, owing to their employment by the U.S. government. Years later, during the Cold War, Representative Richard Nixon and the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) would accuse them of being the “Ware Group”—so named for Harold Ware, the Communist Party organizer for government employees—engaged in espionage; they all denied the accusation, and no charges were ever filed.

Abt was a friend of Ware and his wife, Jessica Smith, editor of Soviet Russia Today. Ware was killed in an automobile crash in 1936, and later Abt and Smith were married. After leaving the AAA, Abt also held posts in the Works Projects Administration and the Securities and Exchange Commission, and was an assistant attorney general in the Justice Department. In 1937 he became chief counsel to the Senate Civil Liberties Committee, under Senator Robert La Follette, Jr., investigating corporate espionage against—and denial of civil liberties to—the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO).

In 1938 Abt became chief counsel to Sidney Hillman, president of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America. For the next ten years, Abt was Hillman’s main political operative within the CIO. He first conceived the notion of political action committees (PACs) and established CIO-PAC (for which he also served as chief counsel) to build organized labor’s political influence. In later years, reflecting on the use of PACs by corporations, Abt regretted his creation. Abt also represented Hillman and the CIO in several international labor congresses.

Following Hillman’s death in 1947, Abt left the Amalgamated to become chief counsel of the Independent Progressive Party, the vehicle for Henry Wallace’s campaign for president. In 1950, Abt and former congressman Vito Marcantonio were hired by the Communist Party to defend it against the Subversive Activities Control Act, better known for its chief sponsor, Senator Pat McCarran of Nevada. Abt had been an informal legal adviser to the Communist Party during the Smith Act trials that imprisoned the main leadership of the party. The Smith Act made illegal “conspiracy to teach and advocate” the forceful overthrow of the government. The act was eventually declared unconstitutional by the U.S. Supreme Court for essentially outlawing free speech. One of the leading Smith Act defendants was Marion Bachrach, Abt’s sister, the party’s publicist who died of cancer following her second trial.

Abt and Marcantonio were joined by Joseph Forer of Washington, D.C., in mounting their legal challenge to the McCarran Act, which made it illegal to belong to the Communist Party or any of nearly two hundred organizations found by the government to be “Communist fronts.” The act described the party as subversive, engaged in conspiracy, terrorism, sabotage, espionage, and other acts against the state, on behalf of a foreign power. Organizations and their individual members could be ordered to register with the government, in effect admitting guilt in such offenses and subjecting themselves to imprisonment and fines. Refusal to register, however, also was grounds for five years’ imprisonment and a $10,000 fine for every day of nonregistration. Among other provisions of the act were those denying passports and outlawing holding office in a trade union or working in a government office or defense facility. Abt called the McCarran Act a “blueprint of American fascism.”

When he, Marcantonio, and Forer signed on to represent the Communist Party in litigation, they did not foresee that it would take twenty-five years and eleven separate appearances before the U.S. Supreme Court to dismantle the McCarran Act and its various provisions. Abt regarded this achievement as his foremost accomplishment. But in the years between 1950 and his retirement in 1980, he also represented thousands of individual clients in court and before school boards, union bodies, state and federal agencies, HUAC, and the Supreme Court. In 1973 he represented Angela Davis in her effort to prevent extradition to California after her arrest in New York. He also provided advice and counsel to the defense team in that celebrated case.

Abt died of a stroke in Copiague, New York, on 8 August 1991. He had just completed recording his memoirs.

Abt, John J., with Michael Myerson. Activist and Advocate: Memoirs of an American Communist Lawyer. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993.

Testimony of John J. Abt. Warren Commission Hearings, Vol. C. Mary Ferrell Foundation. https://www.maryferrell.org/showDoc.html?docId=44#relPageId=124