In this portrait of Kenneth Goff, one-time minor functionary of the Communist party and now a small-time “evangelist” of reaction and anti-Semitism, Nathan Perlmutter offers a glimpse of the shabby and dangerous world of those drifting malcontents who move from one demagogic gospel to another in their search for a doctrine to fit their fantasies—and make them a career.
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In the Milwaukee Auditorium, at the nadir of the depression, in 1936, twenty-two-year-old Kenneth Goff, a rebellious WPA worker from the rural side of the tracks in Delevan, Wisconsin, listened to Earl Browder herald a new world. Goff joined the Communist party, assuming the name of John Keats—who at twenty-two also felt “a new planet swim into his ken.” Less than four years later the blasphemed alias died in the hearing chambers of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. “Keats” had informed on his erstwhile comrades. Shortly thereafter, still wet with darkness, Kenneth Goff returned underground, and he joined forces with Gerald L. K. Smith.
Just who is Kenneth Goff?
A “character” (according to neighbors); a “pain in the neck” (according to Denver and Washington, D.C. law-enforcement officers); “destructive to our fundamental laws” (Veterans of Foreign Wars); “unstable and fanatic” (home-town newspaper); “driven forward with the knowledge that He is with me” (Kenneth Goff).
National Committeeman, Young Communist League; National Director, Anti-Communist League; National Chairman, Christian Youth for America (Gerald L. K. Smith’s); Evangelist minister; criminal.
Intimate of jailed Red leaders Eugene Dennis, Gil Green, and Henry Winston (whom Goff, while still a Communist, referred to before the Dies Committee as a Negro “boy”); intimate of Jew-baiters Gerald L. K. Smith, Father Coughlin, Reverend Arthur Terminiello.
Goff is thirty-seven years old, of average height, ordinary in build, plain-featured, white-haired. His face wears the neutral expression of the stereotype bank teller. He wears eyeglasses, has an artificial leg. His headquarters are in Englewood, Colorado, in the lap of the Rocky Mountains.
He was born of religious, hard-up parents, in a small, Wisconsin community. He speaks of his parents as “old-fashioned Christians.” In truth, they were Congregationalists, “modernists,” and would have been anathema to his Bible Belt circuit. In high school, verbose, gregarious, shallowly clever, Goff was a “leader.” His fellow students called him “the Senator.” He was once appointed by a school teacher to represent the student body in a community activity sponsored by the Congregational Church. However, at the insistence of several of that church’s matrons, Goff was removed from his post. He didn’t come from the “right” social element.
It was during the 30’s that Goff took off, or, perhaps more charitably, was launched on his political career by the depression and unemployment. In March 1936, when the WPA was tiring, Goff, two years out of high school, led a Wisconsin army of strikers in a dramatic seizure of the state Capitol’s assembly chamber. The action not only captured the imagination of Governor La Follette, who contributed to the strikers’ fund, but also intrigued Eugene Dennis, then Eighteenth District organizer for the Communist party. Dennis talked to Goff, and in a matter of days Goff joined the party. He spent three years in it. His assignment, suited to his peculiar talents, was to organize “fronts,” and to direct the infiltration of party members into non-Communist organizations. He himself infiltrated the Townsend oldage pension movement and parroted the the Communist line at its conventions.
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One afternoon in 1939, brief case bulging with confidential party papers, Goff was nervously circling the Palmer House in Chicago. Inside was Martin Dies, chairman of the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Goff finally entered the hotel, sought out Dies, and made a preliminary confession, later embroidered before the full Committee.
Goff’s resignation from the party, tendered from the witness box in the Committee’s hearing chambers, declared his disillusionment with Communism, and his granite intention to “take my stand with those who are fighting for real Americanism and democracy.” In response to questioning by J. B. Matthews, the Committee’s counsel, he emphasized that his patriotism, unsullied by his Communist experience, had prompted his resignation and confession. However, when prompted to expatiate by Matthews’ leading questions, his “patriotism” assumed special meaning: ‘1 have noticed, and I wonder if you have ever noticed, that foreigners who come into this country are able to get jobs. . . . He [the foreigner] has a foreign organization that is in contact with industry. He immediately secures a job, whereas you see American boys always walking the street looking for jobs.”
At the time that he broke with the party, Kenneth Goff was unemployed. The break was preceded by the loss of his leg when his automobile collided with a train. In recalling the accident before the House Committee, he stated: “I was to speak at a meeting, when an accident occurred and the automobile threw me under a rapid transit train.” Subsequently, upon accepting a lieutenancy under Gerald L. K. Smith, he gave a different version. He had been “a marked man” as a result of having voiced opposition to an alleged party protocol that permitted Jewish Communists to hold meetings from which non-Jewish comrades were barred. Shortly after he had made this protest, while driving his automobile, another automobile “loaded with enemies . . .drove directly toward me at a terrific rate of speed. … In a split second I realized that I was being caught between a speeding automobile and a rapidly approaching train. I was hit with a sickening thud and hurled under the wheels. … I found myself under the train, in a pool of blood, my leg severed from my body.” The “enemy,” by inference a Jewish Communist, or an agent of Jewish Communists, “began kicking me in the face, cursing with every movement of his body. That is part of the price I paid for daring to criticize Communist party policy.”
Old acquaintances of Goff, and in unguarded moments Goff himself, provide a third version. Party-member attorneys represented the convalescent in the suit resulting from the accident. He was awarded damages amounting to $5,000. Of this, he received $1,000, and the remainder went to a Communist fund for the Spanish Civil War and to cover the expenses of delegates to a convention of the Young Communist League. He had been pressured for the $4,000 “contribution” while still in a hospital wheel chair by a party lawyer, a Jew. Physically weak, in conflict about the party, he consented. But when he left his hospital bed it was as a perverted Ahab in vengeful quest of a Jewish Moby Dick.
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Goff wasted little time in capitalizing on his membership in the Communist party, billing himself in speaking engagements across the country, “I Was Stalin’s Agent” In 1943, while speaking before a super-patriotic nationalist organization in Chicago, he was “discovered” by Gerald L. K. Smith. The relation they formed, which lasted for some six years, was that of master mechanic and apprentice. Under Smith’s tutelage, Goff became a Fundamentalist evangelist “minister,” fronting a variety of Smith organizations variously labeled “Christian Youth for America,” “Christian Veterans,” “Lutheran Research Bureau,” etc. Certain other incidents during this period included passing a rubber check, a fine for. throwing stink-bombs, and another fine for rent-gouging in defiance of the OPA.
These incidents embarrassed Smith and his “respectable” Christian Nationalist Crusade. In 1949, when the master mechanic refused to raise Goff’s salary, both parties used the occasion for a split. In departing, Goff accused Smith of using his Christian Nationalist Crusade expense account for fast living in expensive hotels. Goff himself had been constantly dissatisfied with the secondand third-rate hotels to which Smith’s control of the Crusade’s purse strings confined him. Today, still billed as “I Was Stalin’s Agent,” Goff has been forced into the Mountain and Plains States’ Bible Belt by the competition of other hate-mongering entrepreneurs. Here he compounds Fundamentalism with revelations about “the real name of David Niles”; here Americanism is interwoven with the “real” significance of Anna Rosenberg’s appointment; and here are unsophisticated audiences still impressed by such tired handbills as “10 MILLION WHITE PEOPLE TO BE Driven from Their Homes to Make Room for Black Communist Soviet.”
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From the Communists Goff learned that the dialectics of Leninism-Stalinism, ordinarily difficult to digest, could be candied over with a Scottsboro Case or a Willie McGee; from the fascists he learned that Goebbels-Alfred Rosenberg could be sugared over with “America First.” A professional nationalist and currently a heckler of the United Nations, Goff some time ago in Denver showed a finesse which might have caused his old comrades to remember him with grudging admiration.
The Women’s Auxiliary of the American Legion had presented the Denver municipality with a set of United Nations flags “estimated to cost $50,000.” The flags, including those of the Soviet Union and its satellites, were flown in a local square in connection with the observance of United Nations Week. In 1950 a vandal tore and trampled the Soviet flag. As a result, the next year, police squads were assigned to the flag-raising ceremonies with special instructions to guard the flag of the USSR. The precautions, however, were of a Keystone variety. The guards stationed themselves around the Byelorussian and Ukrainian flags in the mistaken belief that they were protecting the flag of the Soviet Union.
The driver of a certain sedan proved himself somewhat more versed in flag lore than the local constabulary. For as the flags were being hoisted, the sedan coasted up alongside the Russian flag, a figure scurried from its front seat, slashed the flag several times, dashed back into the auto, and was sped off while the Denver police half a block away “protected” the satellite flags.
The incident received wide publicity. First, the vandalism, then the revelation that the sedan belonged to Goff, then that Goff was an accessory to the culprit, one Dewey McKinley Taft, an itinerant hate-pamphleteer. Then stories on Goff the “fighting minister,” on his being served with a police summons, the finding that the summons was invalid for lack of proper jurisdiction, and finally Goff’s newsy, gleeful boast that he would sue the president of the UN Committee for Colorado for having authorized the flying of the Russian flag “while our boys are dying in Korea.”
The newspapers gaily played the role of brass band. But Goff was dead serious. He reprinted in the thousands newspaper headlines like: MINISTER LONG KNOWN AS ANTICOMMUNIST AGITATOR. These were distributed far and wide, priming a special Reverend Kenneth Goff “defense fund” (the fine Goff faced was all of fifty dollars). More important, his widely quoted platitudes about the “boys in Korea,” the “Communist threat,” etc., made the United Nations rather than the act of vandalism the issue. Result? The president of the UN Committee publicly apologized for having had the Russian flag flown in a UN display, Goff raised sufficient funds to face fines for flag-ripping in all forty-eight states and then some, and the UN suffered a public-relations licking.
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Goff’s speeches today are preceded by musical uplifts, just as in the old days. But the guitar has given way to the organ, and “Stand Up, Stand Up for Jesus” has replaced the labor and revolutionary songs of his “undergraduate” days.
He establishes his tone very quickly. “I met a State Department man in the train on my way here to Greeley [Colorado]. Got to talking with him about Uncle Joe Stay-lin and things. Know what he told me? ‘You goddamn Christians keep your nose out of world affairs!’“
Goff’s is a metallic, insistent voice. In minutes it hammers into silence even the restless children brought along to hear the well-advertised “big-city preacher saved from Communism by Jesus.” As he warms to his task, children as well as parents sit awed and frightened in hard wooden chairs that cease their creaking as he recalls “a particularly revolting picture hanging on the wall [in an office of the ‘Jew-controlled’ Communist party]. It showed Christ’s intestines hanging from his stomach while workers gnaw at his entrails, drinking from his veins. . . .”
Goff’s mountain and prairie circuit followings, mainly Fundamentalists weighed under by a thousand social taboos, eagerly look forward to his appearances. His egomania does not offend them sufficiently, nor do his fantastic theories on world politics (“Within five years we will be engaged in a war with Russia! Don’t believe it? Read Ezekiel! ! /”), to prevent them from being spellbound by his cleverly prudish “smut stories.” Craftily, with the canny boldness of a sorcerer, he weaves vivid visions of sex and sadism, inviting his audiences to the luxury of vicarious sinfulness.
Again and again he tells of the Spanish Civil War and of Loyalist “raids on convents, when every nun would be repeatedly raped by alternating Red beasts until dead. Then their bodies would be piled high like cordwood. . . . After being swathed in oil, the torch was applied and the stench of burning flesh became a sweet odor to the nostrils of these half-crazed Communists.” Significantly, the audiences to which this story is told are first given generous doses of anti -Catholicism. They are audiences to whom Goff can say, “Senator McCarthy is a great American despite being a Roman Catholic.”
To audiences that fear the Negroes more than the Catholics, he tells of Communist Ella Reeve Bloor, who allegedly instructed the girls in Goff’s Communist classes to become the “whores of the revolution.” “White girls would be expected at all times to submit themselves to Negroes, Chinese, and others!”
Before the evening ends, and immediately preceding the passing of the plate, Goff details the Kremlin’s plans for raping the women and girls of Cheyenne, Denver, Omaha, wherever his “Confessions” happen to have been booked. He reveals the plans of the local Communist cells for wrecking radio stations, tearing up streetcar lines, exploding electric plants, and asserts that continued prayer and “support” for him may prevent these catastrophes. His audiences have not been deaf to this appeal.
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Personally, Goff is somewhat less formidable than his public activities make him appear. Last December, the American Christian Friends of Palestine sponsored an appearance in Denver by John Roy Carlson. Carlson, then recently returned from an undercover trip through the Near East, was scheduled to speak on his impressions of Israel and the Arab countries. In the audience, along with some of Denver’s leading citizens, were Richard Hamel, apostate Jew and founder of the American Fascist Union, the Reverend William L. Blessing, named by the American Legion as a “hate” subversive, Dewey McKinley Taft, Goff’s crony, and Goff himself. All asked heckling questions, all received polite replies. After the meeting, Carlson found himself beside Goff. Playfully he hailed Goff with, “How well and handsome you look, Kenneth!”
Goff, who some minutes before had prefaced a baiting question with, “Mr. Carlson, or whatever name you’re going under now,” blushed, hung his head, shuffled his feet, and looked pleased as punch! William Blessing, too, was treated to Carlson’s high spirits. Some days later the chairman of the local American Christian Friends of Palestine committee received a phone call from Blessing, who, speaking for himself and Goff, indicated that a “protest” meeting they had scheduled had been called off as a result of Carlson’s “gracious” treatment of them!
In 1946, while still an associate of the Reverend Harvey Springer, now a bigleague hate-monger, Goff was arrested for passing a rubber check. His “imprisonment” lasted for a few hours in the Denver County Jail, an institution which compares favorably with any other big-city county jail.
Shortly after his release on bond, thousands upon thousands of leaflets captioned “Kenneth Goff in Jail” flooded the mails. The return address? “Kenneth Goff Defense Fund.” The text of the leaflets, deserving honorable mention in anthologies on “prison literature,” detailed his “ordeal.” It told of his arrest while in the ‘Tabernacle,” of his having been fingerprinted “four times” and: “Escaping this crowd of Red reporters [earlier in the text identified by Goff as newsmen for the Rocky Mountain News, a Scripps Howard publication] by quick action on my part, I was taken to the county jail. Then they stripped me of my clothes and examined my wooden leg to see that there were no concealed weapons on me.
“From there I was led through several iron doors to South Lower in the prison and assigned to cell 10 with three other men. South Lower was a smelly, vermin-infested bullpen which was filled with every sort of hard-boiled prisoner, including fourteen murderers, several rapists and an insane man.
“Asking for food, they told me supper had already been served and I would have to wait till morning. Several prisoners got together and fixed me some tea with hot water from the faucet. Then they gave me little old moldy crackers and cookies that they had hidden away to soothe the pangs of hunger. Hot tears rolled down my cheeks as I saw these unfortunate men so willing to give what little they had to aid a fellow man while outside this motley crowd of Jew-Communists were crying for my blood.
“My soul leaped with joy as I realized what an opportunity God had given me to testify to His marvelous saving grace to these shipwrecked men. Many of the men came to me for spiritual advice. Three, who had backslidden, crawled back underneath the cross again. . . .
“As the clock ticked away toward 9:00 P.M., everyone told me I was doomed to spend the night in prison. . . . I felt like singing praises to God and lifted my voice in the good old gospel hymn:
“There’s not a friend
“Like the lowly Jesus;
“No, not one,
“No, not one.
“The guards came running and warned me if I was caught singing again, I would be thrown in the hole. . . .
“Yes, beloved, the fight is still on. This weekend I will appear in court and plead not guilty. The attorney for the D.A.’s office opposing me is a Mr. Lichtenstein.”
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The leaflet ended with a perforated “box” addressed to the “Kenneth Goff Defense Fund.” It read, “After reading your message describing your humiliating treatment at the hands of these Jew-Communists, I am enclosing my sacrificial offering of $—.”
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What of Goff’s conversion from Communism to fascism? Is it really possible for the human robot of 1984 to revert so speedily to Neanderthalism? From Communism to Catholicism or to splinter socialism or even to hard-shell capitalism is not too uncommon a transition. But Communism to fascism?
Or is it possible that the antithesis between the two is greatly exaggerated? Certainly Goff’s effortless change-over from Communism to fascism lends credence to the growing realization that they are two sides of the same totalitarian coin.
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