Annie Lee Moss facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Annie Lee Moss
Annie Lee Moss and her attorney George E.C. Hayes (partially obscured) testifying before the McCarthy committee on March 12, 1954
Born	Annie Lee Crawford August 9, 1905 South Carolina, U.S.
Died	January 1, 1996(1996-01-01) (aged 90) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Occupation	Communications clerk US Army Signal Corps
Known for	Involvement in the McCarthy hearings

Annie Lee Moss (born August 9, 1905 – died January 15, 1996) worked as a communications clerk for the US Army Signal Corps at the Pentagon. She was accused of being a member of the Communist Party. The FBI and her bosses thought she might be a security risk.

Because of these concerns, she was questioned by United States Senator Joseph McCarthy. He was the chairman of a special Senate committee that investigated people suspected of being Communists. Her case became very famous and actually hurt Senator McCarthy's public image.

Growing Up

Annie Lee Crawford was born in 1905 in South Carolina. She had six brothers and sisters. Her father was a tenant farmer, meaning he farmed land owned by someone else.

Later, her family moved to North Carolina. Annie Lee left high school to work as a house helper and a laundress. In 1926, she married Ernest Moss. They moved to Durham, North Carolina, where she worked in tobacco factories.

Her Job in Government

Annie Lee Moss started working for the government as a cook in cafeterias. In 1945, she became a clerk in the General Accounting Office. Then, in 1949, she got a job as a communications clerk for the Army Signal Corps at the Pentagon.

Annie Lee Moss was a mother and a widow. She had worked hard to improve her life since moving to Washington, D.C. in the early 1940s. By 1950, she bought her own home. By 1954, she earned $3,300 a year, which was a good income for Black women at that time.

Loyalty Checks

In 1947, President Harry S. Truman started a program to check the loyalty of government workers. This was called the "loyalty review program." As part of this, Annie Lee Moss was investigated in 1949.

When she got her promotion at the Pentagon in 1950, she was investigated again. This time, the Army decided to suspend her and suggested she be fired. But she appealed this decision, and in January 1951, the Army cleared her.

Facing Senator McCarthy

In September 1951, the FBI told the General Accounting Office that they had evidence Moss was a Communist Party member in the mid-1940s. However, the Army did not reopen her case then.

This evidence came from a woman named Mary Stalcup Markward. She worked as a secret informant for the FBI. From 1943 to 1949, she joined the Communist Party and reported everything back to the FBI. She gave them lists of members and details about meetings.

In February 1954, Markward testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee. She said she saw Annie Lee Moss's name and address on the Communist Party's membership lists in 1944.

McCarthy's Investigation

This is when Senator Joseph McCarthy became interested in Annie Lee Moss. As chairman of the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, he was looking into claims that Communists had secretly joined the Army.

Moss and her lawyer, George E.C. Hayes, appeared before McCarthy's committee on March 11, 1954. This meeting was open to the public. McCarthy had told the news that Moss was "handling the encoding and decoding of confidential and top-secret messages."

However, the Army quickly corrected him. Moss only handled messages that were already encrypted (unreadable). She did not have access to the Pentagon's secret code room.

Her Testimony

Senator McCarthy left the hearing soon after Moss began to speak. His chief lawyer, Roy Cohn, took over the questioning. Annie Lee Moss seemed like a small, quiet, and shy woman. She was very different from the usual targets of McCarthy's investigations, who were often intellectuals or political activists.

She said she rarely read newspapers and didn't even know what Communism was until 1948. When asked to read a document with long words, she struggled. When asked if she knew Karl Marx, she replied, "Who's that?" This made the audience laugh.

She strongly denied the accusations. She said, "Never at any time have I been a member of the Communist Party and I have never seen a Communist Party card." She also stated, "I didn't subscribe to the Daily Worker and I wouldn't pay for it."

Roy Cohn's questioning quickly ran into problems. He claimed that a "Communist activist" named Rob Hall had visited Moss's home. But then, Robert F. Kennedy, another lawyer for the committee, pointed out that there were two Rob Halls in Washington. One was a known white Communist, and the other was an African American union organizer. Moss said the Rob Hall she knew was "a man of about my complexion."

As the hearing continued, it became clear that the senators and the audience were siding with Moss, not Cohn or McCarthy. When Cohn mentioned secret evidence from the FBI, Senator John McClellan criticized him. McClellan said it was unfair to accuse someone with secret evidence that wasn't shown publicly. The audience applauded loudly.

Senator Stuart Symington then suggested that, like the Rob Hall mix-up, the case against Moss might be a case of mistaken identity. Moss immediately agreed, saying there were three women named Annie Lee Moss in Washington, D.C. Symington told her, "I may be sticking my neck out and I may be wrong, but I've been listening to you testify this afternoon and I think you're telling the truth." Again, there was loud and long applause.

TV Coverage and Public Reaction

A cameraman from Edward R. Murrow's TV show See It Now filmed the Moss hearing. The case was shown on the program on March 16, 1954. The week before, Murrow had aired a famous show that was very critical of Senator McCarthy.

Murrow started the Annie Lee Moss show by saying it would present "a little picture about a little woman." He ended it with a recording of President Dwight D. Eisenhower praising the right of Americans to "meet your accuser face to face." Many people liked both shows. Murrow is often given credit for helping to cause McCarthy's eventual downfall.

Support for Moss and criticism of McCarthy grew. A famous writer, John Crosby, wrote that "The American People fought a revolution to defend, among other things, the right of Annie Lee Moss to earn a living, and Senator McCarthy now decided she has no such right."

What Happened Next

Senator McCarthy's popularity was already going down when the Moss hearing happened. The attention around her case made it drop even faster. He soon became involved in the Army–McCarthy hearings, which also greatly hurt his public standing. In December 1954, the Senate officially criticized him. He spent the rest of his career out of the public eye and died in 1957.

Annie Lee Moss had been suspended from her job when McCarthy first showed interest in her case. In January 1955, she was rehired for a different job in the Army's finance office. She continued to work as an Army clerk until she retired in 1975. She passed away in 1996 at the age of 90.

Later Information About Moss

The FBI informant, Mary Markward, had given an address for Annie Lee Moss, and Moss confirmed this address during her testimony. This made the idea of mistaken identity less likely.

In 1958, another government board looked into a similar case. They confirmed Markward's testimony that Moss's name and address were on Communist Party lists in the mid-1940s. Some sources have said this proved Moss was a Communist.

More details came out when Moss's FBI file was released through a Freedom of Information Act request. This file included:

• A list of "party recruits" that named Moss, her race, age, and job.
• Membership lists from two Communist Party groups with Moss's name, address, and membership book number.
• Records from 1945 for Daily Worker newspaper subscriptions.

Historian Andrea Friedman believes that Moss probably had some contact with Communists through her cafeteria workers' union. She thinks Moss might have been a "casual recruit" to the Communist Party, drawn by its ideas about fairness, but later stopped her involvement.

See also

• McCarthyism
• Milo Radulovich