Old Files Hold a Suspicious Era’s Lies and Smears

Gathering dust and almost forgotten in the State Archives are 80 large crates full of smears, lies, false rumors and secret investigative reports on 20,000 Californians alive and dead.

The aging files reach back almost 60 years and record the supposedly subversive activities of alleged Hollywood Communists, labor union leaders, government officials and even 1960s student protests at UC Berkeley.

The documents were so riddled with misinformation, innuendo, guilt by association and libel that they were ordered sealed and stored in 1971 by James R. Mills, a Democrat from San Diego who was then leader of the state Senate and discovered that investigators had been snooping on him.

Now the files--mainly compiled by investigators of the defunct Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities--may be made public, offering Californians a glimpse into a past some would rather forget.

While California’s hunt for subversives may have paled in comparison to the more famous one launched in Congress in the 1950s, which produced the famous Hollywood blacklist and burned the word McCarthyism into the nation’s lexicon, the home-grown version was in some ways a copy of what was happening in Washington.

The files contain reports on the drinking habits of some individuals, secretly recorded conversations, “bigoted comments” and other commentary “not considered politically correct by today’s standards,” according to sources who have seen the documents.

Included are 125,000 carefully kept card files and “intelligence reports” and the names of 20,000 people who came under the scrutiny of legislative investigators, starting in 1939, said Virgil Meibert, a Senate researcher.

Meibert said the 80 crates contain a jumble of tens of thousands of loose documents that took Senate employees a full year to sort, organize and index. “We didn’t know what we had,” he said.

The project was launched under former Senate leader Bill Lockyer (D-Hayward) after several academics asked to look at the files but were turned down.

Mills, who retired from the Legislature in 1982, is familiar with the files.

“There’s a lot of slanderous material in there . . . a lot of baseless stuff. If somebody thought that somebody else was a Red, that was included. There were perfectly honorable people who were listed [merely because] they had gone to some meeting,” Mills said.

Shortly after he was elected Senate leader in 1971, Mills learned that his own name and the names of other legislators were in the committee’s files.

He said one entry listed him as attending a 1961 reception for legislators at a capital hotel hosted by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union. He said there was nothing subversive about the then controversial union.

Another 1961 entry identified Mills as a subscriber to the People’s World, a Communist Party newspaper. Mills said he did not want the publication but that when he tried to stop the subscription, he was told that someone else had paid for it.

When he began returning the newspaper unopened and with postage due, it stopped arriving. Mills said he believes that an unknown Republican enemy may have devised the scheme to embarrass him politically.

Mills declined to identify other people in the files, but he noted that a meeting he once attended could be the kind of circumstance that would ensure someone a place in the files.

He said he was invited to a meeting with the “ambassador of the Republic of China. I thought it was Chiang Kai-shek’s guy from Taiwan. As it turned out, it was Mao’s guy” from the Communist People’s Republic of China. Mills said it would have been politically foolish for an American politician to knowingly attend such a reception.

“That is the kind of thing that shows up in those [documents],” Mills said. “There [are] all kinds of innuendoes and suspicions.”

The Legislature got into the business of investigating “un-American” activities in 1939 when suspected Communists reportedly infiltrated the state welfare agency, then known as the Relief Administration. Heading the probe was an energetic young anti-Communist, Assemblyman Sam Yorty, who later became mayor of Los Angeles.

During World War II and into the 1950s, the committee tracked suspected Communists, ranging from Hollywood figures to union and college faculty members, and issued reports. Critics charged that the reports violated constitutionally protected rights of citizens, contained false information and were based on news reports and tracts from the far-right John Birch Society. Immunity laws protected the Legislature from lawsuits.

In the antiwar 1960s, the committee claimed that student protests at UC Berkeley were inspired by Communists.

The committee’s last report was issued in 1969, and in it were references to 66 alleged Communists or their activities.

In 1971, Mills and the state Senate Rules Committee abolished the Senate Subcommittee on Un-American Activities. The secret files were locked away.

But the confidentiality that protected the files may soon be lifted by the Senate Rules Committee.

Gregory Schmidt, secretary of the California Senate, said he intends to propose a plan by which at least some records would be made public.

Schmidt’s concern is devising a way of releasing the materials while protecting the reputations of innocent people, alive or dead, whose files may contain false or purely personal information.

Schmidt said Tuesday that he is considering recommending that files, notes or other documents be at least 50 years old before they are made public, a practice that he said conforms to the federal policy governing records of the former House Committee on Un-American Activities.

“There’s some stuff in there that isn’t political,” Schmidt said. “Personal stuff may be troublesome.”

Mills said he believes that academics, news reporters and others with a “legitimate reason” should be given access to the documents.

“If the history or political science professor wants access, that’s fine,” Mills said. “But if my neighbor, who might be a right-wing nut, wants access to it, I don’t think that’s fine.”