Soviet spy Harry Dexter White in Appleton, Wisconsin, 1932
Appleton, Wisconsin today has 74,719 people living in it.
In 1932, it had 28,436 people.
It’s always been a bit of a sleepy midwestern town.
There’s one liberal arts college, Lawrence College, or “Lawrence University” as they prefer to be called now.
Their mascot is “Blu.” Which has something to do with Vikings.
Two miles outside of town in 1932 there was an even smaller little town named Grand Chute, Wisconsin. Today, it has effectively merged with Appleton. But in 1932, it was a bunch of small farmers.
And at 6071 McCarthy Road in Grand Chute, there was a family who was raising a crop of Catholic kids, Bridget and Timothy McCarthy. Mother Bridget was from Ireland, and Father Timothy was an American who was half Irish and half German.
They had nine children, and one of them was future Senator Joseph R. McCarthy (1908-1957).
McCarthy was at Marquette in Milwaukee from 1930-1935. He passed the bar and became an attorney in 1935.
He had enrolled in high school in nearby Manawa, aged 20, in 1929, finishing in one year. Manawa is about 30 miles northwest of Appleton.
He was also the manager of the “Cash-Way” grocery store in town. He had opened the store on May 11, 1929.
And for a period in late 1929, was managing the Cash-Way in Appleton.
Over the summer of 1930, McCarthy had apparently been moved to the Cash-Way store in Shlocton, which is 20 miles northwest of Appleton.
The point is, that a college-aged Joseph McCarthy was tending a grocery store in the Appleton and surrounding region, while also working on his college studies.
And in that area, at the liberal arts college in Appleton, was Harry Dexter White.
White was teaching these courses:
Principles of Economics
International Economic Problems
Temporary Economic Trends
Statistics
White is, today, considered perhaps the most senior ranking American official to be generally acknowledged as a Soviet espionage agent and agent of influence.
White started his academic career at Columbia in 1922, age 29, where he spent a year and a half. He then went to Stanford where he received his B.A. and M.A., in 1924 and 1925. He then finished his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1932 after having taught for four years.
Harvard University Press published White’s dissertation in 1933, The French International Accounts, 1880–1913. This would end up being White’s only book.
Two of its inscriptions were to men who were later said to be Soviet spies: Lauchlin Currie and Abraham George Silverman (1900-1973), who provided the Soviets with secrets.
Alger Hiss (1904-1996) was nearby at Harvard Law from 1926-1929. Lauchlin Bernard Currie (1902-1993) was also at Harvard from roughly 1925-1934. Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965) was a professor of law at Harvard from 1914-1939. All of these men were associated with Communist subversion.
Some of the yearbooks from Lawrence University are online.
The years 1932 and 1933 are not easily available. The year 1934 doesn’t list White.
Oddly, economics professor and Soviet agent White was the chaperone for a sorority dance at Lawrence.
It seems a little bit more realistic that White was the head of the ‘Current Events’ club.
While White was living in Appleton, he very easily could have been shopping idly at a store run by Joseph McCarthy.
The Communist spy and the Communist spyhunter, less than two decades away for major consequences for them both. White would have been aged 40-41 during this period of time, and McCarthy would have been 23-24.
White would leave Lawrence College to work for the Treasury Department under Henry Morgenthau (1891-1967), working with other Communist spies like Lauchlin Currie and Virginius Frank Coe (1907-1980).
Prof. Jacob Viner (1892-1970) would bring together a team to work under Morgenthau. The team included White and also Lauchlin Currie and Frank Coe.
Morgenthau had made a team of advisers overseeing various policy areas of the department.
McCarthy would leave Appleton in order to enlist in the Second World War as a Marine, fighting in the South Pacific.
They would both end up in Washington, and they would just barely miss one another in the great contest of Communist subversion.
White would die on August 16, 1948, three days after denying he knew ten men accused of Communist espionage and treason.
McCarthy’s famous Wheeling speech would be 18 months later, on February 9, 1950.
When White left Lawrence College, he was replaced by Walter B. Harvey.
After White’s 1948 death and when it came out that he had been a Soviet agent, it became difficult for President Truman to explain why he would appoint White as the first head of the International Monetary Fund from 1946-1947.
Truman’s explanations never matched, since the FBI was warning Truman in 1946 that White was a security risk. But as with most Democrat crimes, the media and academia just shrug their shoulders and say it was a simple misunderstanding.
The president of Lawrence College at the time of White’s brief appointment there was Dr. Henry Merritt Wriston (1889-1978), who led the college from 1925-1937.
Dr. Wriston earned his PhD in political science from Harvard and was the President of the Council on Foreign Relations from 1951-1964. He was later known as the long-time President of Brown University, from 1937-1955. The Rockefellers made a $4 million donation to Brown, explicitly on the basis of Wriston’s leadership.
Wriston was on the Board of Trustees of the World Peace Foundation, which some claim is just a Rockefeller front. Notably another former trustee of the WPF is Alger Hiss.
Wriston was an adviser to President Dwight David Eisenhower (1890-1969), and was also the father to a Chairman and CEO of Citibank, Walter Wriston (1919-2005). President George Walker Bush honored Walter Wriston with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004.
