Perlo, Victor and Ellen

PERLO, VICTOR AND ELLEN. Noted economist, prolific author, Communist Party National Committee member and long-term Daily World columnist, Victor Perlo (1912-1999 was born and raised in Queens, New York. He attended Columbia University, earning a Master of Arts in mathematics in 1933, during which time he became affiliated with the Party. That year, Perlo married his first wife, Katherine, and became employed by the National Recovery Administration and the Federal Home Loan Bank Board through 1937. He worked for the Brookings Institution through 1939 before returning to the federal government until 1947.

Ellen Perlo (1916-2019), visual artist, editor, chair of the Communist Party Arts Club and staff member of World Magazine, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. She engaged in creative endeavors throughout childhood and in 1934 attended New York University’s School of Architecture and Allied Arts, graduating with a Fine Arts degree. Ellen became radicalized by the Spanish Civil War, working tenaciously to build US support for the democratic cause against the fascist military coup. She joined the Communist Party (CP) during World War II. As a young member in Manhattan, she met the elders of Party cultural programs and was drawn to organizations such as Artists for the Defense and Artists for Victory.

Ellen and Victor Perlo met in this period. After a bitter divorce from Katherine Perlo, Victor married Ellen in 1943, moving to Washington DC to accommodate his job with the US Treasury Department. Shortly after the war, Victor was caught up in the anti-Communist investigations of government workers. It is uncertain if he was a Party member membership at the time, but he was a close associate, authoring articles and papers for the CP press dating back to 1931. Perlo was nevertheless blacklisted. His appointment to head the United Nations relief agency, based in Paris, was recalled, his passport confiscated. He was cited as a Communist by Whitaker Chambers during the 1948 HUAC hearings, where Perlo took the Fifth Amendment. However, greater harm had resulted from Katherine Perlo’s 1944 accusation that her ex-husband spied for the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Perlo was accusing of leading a ring of spies in government, the Perlo Group.

In 1948, the Perlos relocated to Flushing, Queens, New York, where Ellen worked for the American Labor Party and became a staple of the peace movement. She remained active over the next several decades in the Women’s Strike for Peace and Westchester Political Action Coalition (WESPAC). She worked closely with Victor in designing charts, aiding in research and editing the economic articles and books he was now free to publish under his own name.

Victor became an advisor to the 1948 Henry Wallace presidential campaign, placing the couple into the inner Party circle. In the following years he published his first book, American Imperialism (1951), followed by Trends in the Economic Status of the Negro People (1952), The Income Revolution (1954), and The Empire of High Finance (1957). He also began teaching at the New School for Social Research and lecturing at Harvard University.

Engaging in cultural work, Ellen became close friends with radical artists, including Paul Robeson, who forged cultural activism in the 1920s and 1930s. She attended the infamous Peekskill, New York concert featuring Robeson and hosted by Howard Fast. Looking back, Ellen reflected: “On the way out, as we walked to our cars, we saw a wall of cops and then we were encountered by these men – they were yelling out such filth to us.” The dozens of cars were instructed to exit by way of a single-lane wooded path flanked by thickets of trees. “These men began pounding the car with rocks. The windshield was immediately smashed! I was furious and shouted back at them. Later I had to comb shards of glass out of my hair. This was fascism—like what we are starting to see again today.”

Victor and Ellen were advocates for victims of the Smith Act and demonstrated on behalf of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. In 1957, the Perlos were active in the civil rights movement. Ellen joined the staff of World Magazine, the Sunday insert to the CP newspaper, working under noted editor Joseph North (1904-1976). After the Perlos moved to Croton-on-Hudson, New York, Ellen led the Party’s Arts Club, which met weekly from the 1960s through the 1980s, offering educational and experiential activities, guest artist workshops, and valuable discussion. On behalf of the club, the Perlos began traveling to socialist nations to meet with cultural workers and arranged for communications and visits from artists of many lands. Victor Perlo continued to write several books on economics and a plethora of pamphlets as well a regular column for the Daily World, later People’s Weekly World.

Ellen became a member of Artists for Nuclear Disarmament and participated in the mass anti-nuclear weapon demonstrations. The Perlos spoke out against the Reagan and Bush administrations, war, racism and inequity, and fought for workers’ rights through actions, art, lectures and writings. After Victor died, Ellen continued her Party activism and hosting the CP Westchester Club throughout the rest of her long life. Victor and Ellen Perlo were posthumously given Lifetime Achievement Awards at the 2013 People's World Better World Awards ceremony.

“Victor Perlo’s Penetrating Analysis of US foreign policy.” People’s World. Aug 1, 2007

Obituary. “Ellen Perlo, 102; advocate for equality, peace, justice and socialism.” John Wojcik. Peoples World. January 14, 2019.

Perlo, Victor and Ellen. Dynamic Stability: The Soviet Economy Today. Chicago: Progress Publishers, 1980.

Bell Archives: Perlo Collection. Frostburg State University.