George Shaw Wheeler

George Shaw Wheeler (May 22, 1908 – October 18, 1997) (known also as George S. Wheeler) was an American economist and advisor to President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, best known for being the first American to defect over the Iron Curtain to Czechoslovakia in November 1947.

Wheeler's defection inspired his friend Noel Field to defect in 1949 and US Senator Joseph McCarthy cited Wheeler's name when accusing US President Harry S. Truman of "Trumanism", i.e., "the placing of your political party above the interest of the country", specifically when it came to promoting alleged Communist spy Harry Dexter White and others (including Wheeler).

Background

American Couple Asks Czech HavenAsserting that the immediate reason for the statement was "to protest against the brutal and unlawful treatment by the American occupation authorities of fifty-eight Czechoslovak citizens who were kidnapped in a carefully planned and typically gangster plot and flown over the border of their country," he [Wheeler] declared that "I want to have nothing in common with the Gestapo methods of the executors of American policy ... I place myself proudly in the camp of peace and progress."(The New York Times, 8 April 1950, page 1

Career

In the early 1930s, Wheeler also served as assistant head of the economics department at the University of Chicago. Then, in 1935, he and his wife moved to the Washington, DC area.

According to Jay Lovestone, Wheeler was there to help control Brigadier General Frank McSherry, "a patsy for the Communists" according to David Dubinsky and who had worked with Sidney Hillman on the War Production Board. In June 1945, Wheeler helped write a 16-page "procedure for organizing unions".

Soviet espionage Conservative Texas Democrat Martin Dies Jr. served as chair of the Special Committee on Un-American Activities (predecessor to the permanent House Un-American Activities Committee) for its entire 7-year duration An FBI report dated February 28, 1942, reported information from the Dies Committee that Wheeler was a member of the American Peace Mobilization's Washington Book Shop and was a member at large of the Executive Council of the Washington Committee to Aid China. On March 24, 1942, the FBI interviewed Wheeler in New York, at which time he denied being a member of the Communist Party. He admitted to being a member of the Washington Committee for Democratic Action and attending meetings of the American Peace Mobilization. ), Josiah E. DuBois Jr., Richard Sasuly, George Shaw Wheeler, Heinz Norden, Max Lowenthal, and Allan Rosenberg (member of Lowenthal's staff). Dondero stated, "It is with considerable regret that I am forced to the conclusion the Secretary Patterson falls short of these standards."

In September 1947, Wheeler's was the chief name in the press noted as "the latest victim of the apparent housecleaning is George S. Wheeler".

On October 15, 1947, Dondero responded by letter to the editor to an unsigned editorial dated October 5 in The Washington Post entitled "Trial by Whimsy". Dondero asked "to reopen the entire unsavory record of the case of George Shaw Wheeler". He expressed desire "to make public the record of this entire proceeding regardless of whom it may involve". Wheeler fled behind the Iron Curtain into Czechoslovakia. He became a professor of economics at the Charles University. He also became Prague correspondent for the radical National Guardian of New York City, according to the publications executive editor James Aronson.

On April 6, 1948, Dondero again questioned support for Wheeler from William Treadwell Stone and David A. Morse.

In a July 9, 1948, letter to The Washington Post, Wheeler countered Dondero's 1947 and 1948 charges at length. He dismissed Dondero's charges because Dondero in fact disliked their roles in Nazi war crimes trials, denazification, investigations into German corporate conglomerates (e.g., I.G. Farben), and supporting the New Deal so-called "discredited" policies of US Presidents Roosevelt and Truman (particularly the Potsdam Agreement). Wheeler notes that he received two further clearances by government investigators since Dondero made his allegations. Further, the government never made any specific charges of disloyalty. He cites a stream of "excellent" ratings for performance (most late in September 1947) and a letter of recommendation from an Army colonel dated March 10, 1948, for his "policies and plans" as "democratic and practicable". Rather than defecting, Wheeler says that he entered Czechoslovakia "the way thousands of other tourists" and stayed to lecture "in the field in which I am trained". Wheeler counters Dondero's query, "Will anyone pay for the damage that has been done?" (i.e., by Wheeler's alleged communist sympathies) with his own thoughts on suing Dondero for slander but concludes it too "time-consuming" and a "costly procedure which I cannot afford".

(In 1949, Noel Field, another American spy for the Soviets, found inspiration in Wheeler's successful flight and new life led him to seek refuge in Czechoslovakia for himself. Both men had come under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Wheeler's public request for political asylum remained in the press throughout the year. On October 19, 1950, columnist Walter Winchell (who by then had gone from liberal to conservative) commented:

Continued allegations

On November 19, 1950, the government published Max Lowenthal's closed-session testimony from September 15, 1950. During testimony, Lowenthal had denied aiding or abetting Communists in government service. Specifically, he denied any involvement in the employment or sponsoring of George Shaw Wheeler. Lowenthal noted that Wheeler had been transferred to his division on the Board of Economic Warfare from the War Production Board "toward the end of my service with the board" He also said that Wheeler had not worked with him in Germany.

In 1951, the Saturday Evening Post mentioned Wheeler and Lowenthal in a long article on Carol Weiss King: (Note: The detail about Wheeler's being a lawyer conflicts with other available resources, which call him an economist.)

McCarthy and other allegations

In a speech on November 24, 1953, broadcast on radio and television, US Senator Joseph McCarthy cited Wheeler as an example of how the New Deal government was "crawling with communists" (a week after US Attorney General Herbert Brownell Jr. had questioned Truman's role in promoting the late Harry Dexter White). He chastised then US Senator Truman for intervening and stopping the dismissal of Wheeler from government service. McCarthy then questioned why another American official who had served in Germany, John Paton Davies Jr., also questioned by a loyalty board, was still in government. Newspapers reported that "Democrats interpret the Wheeler reference, therefore, as a carefully veiled warning to Ike", in that then General Dwight Eisenhower was still based in Germany at the time. The Eisenhower Administration saw the Wheeler mention as an attack on the President as well as General Clay. They also noted that the speech placed McCarthy in a position of "wide and nearly implacable opposition to President Eisenhower".

On April 24, 1954, United States Secretary of Labor James P. Mitchell told the US House Appropriations Committee that his department had dismissed five employees for "falsifying their job applications" and another 17 with "unfavorable information in their files were allowed to resign". During the same hearing, US Representative Fred E. Busbey stated that Under Secretary David A. Morse "once helped to get a loyalty clearance for a Federal employee who later "went behind the Iron Curtain to join the Communists". Busbey named that person as "John Shaw Wheeler", but The New York Times corrected by stating "Busbey apparently referred to the case of George Shaw Wheeler".

In 1954, the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences hired Wheeler as an economist and writer.

Later years

In 1961, Wheeler earned a doctorate in economics from Charles University in Prague. Wheeler retired from Washington State University and taught at Franconia College until 1977. G.S. Wheeler, bojovník za mier ("G.S. Wheeler, a warrior for peace") (1950) Výstraha ("Warning") (1956) Vývoj a problémy zemědělství USA ("Development and Problems of Agriculture in the USA") (1958) Die amerikanische Politik in Deutschland (1945-1950) ("US Politics in Germany (1945-1950)") (1958) Развитие сельского хозяйства ССHА и его проблемы ("US agricultural development and its problems") (1959) 美国农业的发展和问題 ("US agricultural development and its problems") (1962) Американская политика в Германии, 1945-1950 ("American politics in Germany, 1945-1950") (1960) 美国对德政策, 1945-1950 ("US policy toward Germany, 1945-1950") (1962) Who Split Germany? Wall Street and the West German trade union leaders (1962) The Human Face of Socialism: The Political Economy of Change in Czechoslovakia (1973) Contraddizioni del socialismo: economia e democrazia in Cecoslovacchia (1976)