Noel Field, Communist Quaker

[Draggingtree]

Noel Field, Communist Quaker

 

Review: Kati Marton, 'True Believer: Stalin’s Last American Spy'

 

BY: Joseph Bottum — September 17, 2016 4:59 am

They came from the old American families: Quakers out of Pennsylvania, Puritans from New England. They went to the fine old boarding schools and attended ivy-covered colleges. Their childhoods were spent in pews listening to the most intellectual and morally sophisticated pastors in America. And then they grew up and went off to spy for Stalin.

 

We still have no fully persuasive explanation for why members of the elite classes of British schooling and intellectual upbringing—Philby, Maclean, Blunt—became spies for the Soviets in the 1930s. But we have even less explanation for why their American parallels—including such people as Alger Hiss, Laurence Duggan, and Noel Field—joined them.

 

As the years pass, and book after yet another book on the Cold War tumbles from the publishing houses, I’ve grown to think the answer lies, to a larger degree than we commonly suspect, in the failing of the blue-blood Protestant institutions that had given elite America its tone. A generation of fervent young people, trained up in idealism and service by their high Protestant upbringings, found only doubt and a failure of nerve among their teachers

http://freebeacon.com/culture/communist-quaker/