The Life and Lies of Paul Crouch: Communist, Opportunist, Cold War Snitch

Abstract

Gregory S. Taylor, who previously authored a history of the Communist party in North Carolina, is perfectly suited to deliver this first biography of one of the most infamous Communists from the Tar Heel State. Paul Crouch's notoriety owes not merely to his years of work as a party organizer throughout the South and the West but to his break with the party during World War II, followed by his dramatic shift to anticommunism in the early Cold War years. Anticommunism became Crouch's profession. Taylor presents this paid informant as a “pathological liar” whose almost-routine perjury did damage both to victims on the left and to the anticommunist cause (p. 8). Taylor's central argument is that Crouch symbolized the dangers inherent when ideologues enter positions of political power. Taylor's evenhanded study charts Crouch's course from leftist radical to Cold War opportunist. Witnessing the injustice of the Red Scare during his formative years, Crouch gravitated to the Communist orbit while stationed in a military intelligence post in Hawaii during the 1920s. Court-martialed for revolutionary activities, Crouch served three years in prison, becoming a minor cause célèbre and propaganda symbol. Upon his release, Crouch toured the Soviet Union while Josef Stalin consolidated his dictatorship in the late 1920s. Crouch's zealous ideological faith enabled his willingness to ignore the clear oppression he witnessed. Taking his cue from Red Army chief Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Crouch returned home to plot the infiltration of the U.S. military. His career as a Communist was spent largely as an organizer, however. Fatigue seems to explain his break from the party, for Crouch tired not only of the ever-shifting party line but also of his itinerant existence. Crouch would ultimately become an anticommunist ideologue, but opportunism initially motivated his transition to Cold War snitch. Despite Federal Bureau of Investigation (fbi) awareness of his fabrications, Crouch's lucrative career as paid informant made him vital in attacks on such notables as Harry Bridges, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and even Charlie Chaplin. His patrons included Senators Joseph McCarthy and James Eastland, but in the wake of the Army-McCarthy hearings, in which Crouch served as a key source for the junior senator from Wisconsin, the mainstream press grew more vigilant in questioning Crouch's reliability, and officials in the Justice Department and fbi had little interest in coming to his defense. Unlike his fellow professional informant Harvey Matusow, Crouch never admitted his lies. His lonely death from cancer came in 1955.