Hal Ware was one of a Communist dynasty. His half-brother, Carl Reeve, was at one time a district organizer of the Communist Party, and, during my time, was once briefly attached to the Daily Worker staff. Hal's wife was Jessica Smith (now Mrs. John Abt and the sister-in-law of Marion Bachrach). For many years, Comrade Smith has been editor of Soviet Russia Today (now called New World Review), a magazine of facts and figures (impartially taken from Soviet sources) and adding up to a paean of Soviet progress, beamed monthly toward the unthinkingly enlightened American middle class.

Hal's sister, Helen Ware, in i934 operated a violin studio on Connecticut Avenue in Washington. It will play a brief obbligato later on in this narrative.

Harold Ware was a frustrated farmer. The soil was in his pores. Unlike most American Communists, who managed to pass from one big city to another without seeing anything in the intervening spaces, Ware was absorbed in the land and its problems. He held that, with the deepening of the agrarian crisis, which had preceded the world financial and industrial crisis, and with the rapid mechanization of agriculture, the time had come for revolutionary organization among farmers.

But first he decided to do a little farming himself. In the early 1920's he set out with a group of American radicals for the Soviet Union to develop a collective farm, the so-called Kuzbas colony. Later, Hal Ware returned to the United States. He did not return empty-handed. The Communist International was also convinced that the time was ripe for organizing the American farmer. Harold Ware himself told me that, for that purpose, he brought back from Moscow $25,000 in American money secreted in a money belt-such a belt as I was soon to wear to San Francisco for another purpose.

Around 1925, Ware hired himself to the Department of Agriculture as a dollar-a-year man. Later on, he set up in Washington a small fact-finding and information bureau called Farm Research. In that enterprise he associated with him two congenial young men. One was the brother of a man named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts, and a close friend of Harry Dexter White, then with the United States Treasury Department, and also one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts. The other, later an expert on labor relations at a United States consulate in Australia, was, until rather recently, an employe of the State Department.

Seldom has $25,000 bought so much history. But Ware did not invest all (or perhaps even much of his nest egg) in Washington. To my knowledge, he maintained close ties with the Communist Party's underground sharecroppers' union at Camp Hill, Alabama, and no doubt with other undergrounds in the West and South.

It was not necessary to invest heavily in Washington. Once the New Deal was in full swing, Hal Ware was like a man who has bought a farm sight unseen only to discover that the crops are all in and ready to harvest. All that he had to do was to hustle them into the barn. The barn in this case was the Communist Party. In the A.A.A., Hal found a bumper crop of incipient or registered Communists. On its legal staff were Lee Pressman, .Alger Hiss and John Abt (later named by Elizabeth Bentley as one of her contacts). There was Charles Krivitsky, a former physicist at New York University, then or shortly afterwards to be known as Charles Kramer (also, later on, one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts). Abraham George Silverman (another of Elizabeth Bentley's future contacts) was sitting with a little cluster of Communists over at the Railroad Retirement Board. In the Agriculture Department (after a flier in the N.R.A. ) there was Henry H. Collins, Jr., now the head of the American-Russian Institute, cited as subversive by the Attorney General. Collins was the son of a Philadelphia manufacturer, a schoolboy friend of Alger Hiss, and a college friend of the late Laurence Duggan (who was later to be one of Hede Massing's underground contacts). There was Nathan Witt in the National Labor Relations Board. There was John Abt's sister, Marion Bachrach. In the N.R.A., then or later, was Victor Perlo (also one of Elizabeth Bentley's contacts). Widening vistas opened into the United States Government. Somewhat breathlessly, Harold Ware reported to J. Peters, the head of the underground section of the American Communist Party, with whom Hal was in close touch, that the possibilities for Communist organization in Washington went far beyond farming.

I do not know how many of those young men and women were already Communists when Ware met them and how many joined the Communist Party because of him. His influence over them was personal and powerful. But about the time that Ulrich and Charlie were initiating me into The Gallery and invisible ink, Harold Ware and J. Peters were organizing the Washington prospects into the secret Communist group now known by Ware's name-the Ware Group.
Under oath, before the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Lee Pressman, in 1951, testified that he, Witt, Abt and Kramer had been Communists and members of this group. He also gave an account of its organization which may well bear a sketchy resemblance to its first formative stage. But, by 1934, the Ware Group had developed into a tightly organized underground, managed by a directory of seven men. In time it included a number of secret sub-cells whose total membership I can only estimate probably about seventy-five Communists. Sometimes they were visited officially by J. Peters who lectured them on Communist organization and Leninist theory and advised them on general policy and specific problems. For several of them were so placed in the New Deal agencies (notably Alger Hiss, Nathan Witt, John Abt and Lee Pressman) that they were in a position to influence policy at several levels.
They were so well-placed that the thought had occurred to Comrade Peters, and no doubt to others, that such human material could be used more effectively, and, moreover, that it was poor organization to leave so many promising Communists in one large group where everybody knew everybody else. Peters proposed to separate the most likely ones (an almost invariable underground practice) and place them in another distinct underground-a parallel apparatus-much more rigorously segregated and subdivided. When advisable, other Communists would be added to this special apparatus from other undergrounds in Washington. For the Ware Group was not the only Communist underground in the capital. This task Peters assigned to me....

The relationship of the leading committee to the secret cells was much like that of the Central Committee to the units of the open Communist Party. The Group was headed, when I first knew it, by Harold Ware himself. After Ware's death in 1935, Nathan Witt became the leader of the Group. Later, John Abt, for reasons not known to me, became its leader.

An effort has been made to describe the Ware Group as merely a "Marxist study group." That is not true. The Ware Group was an integral (and highly important) unit of the underground section of the American Communist Party. Until his death, it was under the constant direction of Harold Ware. It was always under the personal supervision of J. Peters, whose visits to it were at least monthly, and sometimes more frequent. On trade-union questions, and much of its activity had to do with trade-union and other labor problems, at least one of its members sometimes consulted in New York with Jack Stachel, one of the party's top men in trade-union work.

Nathan Witt, a secret Communist and a former member of the Ware group, became the first secretary (staff director) of the NLRB and hired many secret Communists. One of the first three NLRB commissioners, Edwin S. Smith, also became a close ally of the CPUSA. The Communist group in the NLRB held regular caucuses to decide on policy and also communicated regularly with Lee Pressman, the former Ware group member who was also the chief attorney for the CIO. The result was a pronounced NLRB bias in favor of the CIO to the detriment of the AFL and employers who resisted CIO organizing drives. The NLRB's pro-CIO bias became so obvious and the rumors of the existence of the Communist caucus inside the NLRB so strong that by 1940 it became an embarrassment for the Roosevelt administration.20 Witt was forced to resign from his post, and President Roosevelt refused to reappoint Smith when his term as NLRB commissioner expired in 1941. Smith went on to become a registered agent (professional lobbyist) for the Soviet Union. The officials Roosevelt appointed to replace Smith and Witt quickly dispersed the Communist group in the NLRB.

Nathan Witt (1903-82) graduated from New York University and Harvard Law School. He was on the IJA with Hiss and Pressman and went with them to Washington, D.C., to join the AAA and the Ware Group. In 1933 he was an attorney on the staff of the AAA; he then moved to the National Recovery Administration (NRA); in 1936 he transferred to the legal staff as assistant general counsel of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB); in 1937 he was its secretary." After he resigned from the board in 1941, he became a partner in the New York law firm of Witt & Cammer. He also had been counsel to many unions and in 1955 gave up his law practice to become full-time counsel to the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers. When that union merged with the United Steel Workers of America in the 1960s, Witt became associate counsel for the union's Mine, Mill and Smelter division. He retired from that position in 1975.