LA Weekly du lieu suivant : Los Angeles, California • 20

While the Reagan administration speaks of the Communist menace in Nicaragua and warns of subversives among illegal aliens from Central America, Seattle has embraced Managua as a sister city; its churches are among the most vigorous proponents of the Sanctuary movement. But Seattle is also where the neo-Nazi fanatics of the Order staged robberies and where the showcase trial of these right-wing revolutionaries was held. Out of the Past mother was a descendant of Jonathan Edwards, the 18th-century clergyman. Educated at Quaker schools, Goldmark was first in his class as Haverford and went to Harvard Law School, where he served on the Law Review and was graduated with honors in 1941. Goldmark then enlisted in the Navy and fought in the battle of the Philippines.

Shortly after her marriage, Sally Gold-mark left the Communist Party. My husband was not sympathetic with it, she said later. He was a person with whom I could talk about it. He was both reasonable and logical, and I agreed with him. During the McCarthy era Sally talked freely about her Communist days both with the FBI and before an executive session of the House Un-American Activities Committee.

After the war, the Goldmarks moved west, eventually buying a ranch in Okanogan County along the Columbia River in northeastern Washington. As the ranch prospered, the Goldmarks became active in community affairs. In 1956, John Goldmark, a liberal Democrat, was elected to the first of three terms in the state legislature, eventually becoming chairman of the state House Ways and Means Committee. Early in 1962, as the legislative election campaign began, a local weekly newspaper reported that Goldmark was running on a platform which advocates the repeal of the McCarran Act, a law requiring the registration of all Communist Party members, adding that his son Charles was a sophomore at Reed College, the only school in the Northwest where Gus Hall, secretary of the Communist Party, was invited to speak. The paper also reported that Goldmark was a member of the American Civil Liberties Union, which was described as an organization closely affiliated with the Communist movement in the United States.

These newspaper attacks were accompanied by a campaign directed against Sally Goldmark. Local right-wing newspapers published articles about a mysterious Irma Ringe and the Washington state legislature. One story described an unnamed legislator whose wife had a startling past. The article went on to say that in the days when notorious communists were operating high, wide and handsome in the nations capitol this woman, known in the Communist Party as Irma Mae Ringe, was a member of a Communist study group. Another story charged that the Communists had set the Goldmarks up in ranching, that they werent really married, and that John Goldmark refused to salute the flag.

Albert F. Canwell, former head of the states Un-American Activities Committee, and (as the publisher of the American Intelligence Service an active figure in right-wing politics, wrote articles attacking Goldmark. In one widely circulated interview, Canwell recalled: In the early 50s the research director of the House Un-American Activities Committee asked me to look into the case of Irma Ringe, who had been a member of the second-highest Communist cell in Washington. Ever alert to the Communist threat, which he described as like an octopus the heart or the center may be in Moscow, but the tentacles are everywhere, Canwell reported that Irma Ringe was living in the state of Washington and was married to John Goldmark, a member of the Washington state legislature I might add, too, that she says she left the Communist Party, and I might accept that in How a 20-year-old smear cost a family its life. the light that it is given if her activity were such as to indicate a clean break with the party Canwell suggestively termed Sallys behavior inconsistent.

By election time the smears had turned into an avalanche. It was rumored that Sally Goldmark had known Alger Hiss, and there even were muted comparisons to the Rosenbergs. Goldmark was badly beaten. He not only had lost his seat but was regarded by some as a communist and by others as outright disloyal. The Vigilante, another Canwell sheet, gleefully referred to the bullet that got Goldmark.

By this time Sally Goldmark had achieved near-mythic proportions as an agent of the shadowy communist conspiracy. After the election, Goldmark decided to sue a group of local right-wingers, including Canwell, for libel, and insisted on holding the trial in conservative Okanogan County. The case began November 4, 1963, before a jury of rural westerners. Witnesses came from across the nation to testify in behalf of John Goldmark, on the nature of the Communist Party and its supposed threat to the U.S., and about the ACLU. Three weeks into the trial Lee Harvey Oswald murdered President Kennedy.

In the end, the jury found in favor of Goldmark, awarding him total damages of $40,000 at the time the largest libel judgment in Washington history. It was a knock-down drag-out battle between left and right over the supposed communist menace, one of the most famous libel suits of its time, and beyond that, a testament to the idea of a jury trial. In 1979 John Goldmark died of cancer. Last summer Sally Goldmark, who had become active in Seattle democratic politics, passed away. Her eldest son, Charles, a prominent lawyer in Seattle, had also become a figure in Democratic Party politics.

Charles Goldmark fought Jimmy Carters renomination in 1980 and was a Hart delegate in 1984. When Sally Goldmark died, her obituaries described her early days in the Communist Party, her marriage, tffe smear campaign against her family, and the vindicating libel suit. About the same time, Ashley Holden, one of Canwells co- continued on page 22 and, despite the familys vindication, remained part of the mythology of the right until its bloody denouement on Christmas Eve. he story, as recounted in William L. Dwyers The Goldmark Case begins in Brooklyn during the 1930s.

Irma Ringe she hated the name and was always known as Sally had wanted to become a doctor, but when the Depression wiped out her familys livelihood, she went to Washington to work for the New Deal, first at the Works Progress Administration, then at the National Youth Administration. She soon became the center of a lively group of intellectuals, artists, writers and teachers. Moved by social injustice and the Depression, Sally joined the Communist Party and for six years attended meetings and paid dues. I really felt at the time that the whole capitalist system had broken down as far as being able to provide gainful work, wages, to people, she later recalled. Shortly after the war began, Sally Ringe met and fell in love with a man named John Goldmark, who was in Washington to await his naval gmimission.

They were married late in 1942. John Goldmark had grown up in New York City. His father was an engineer and came from a distinguished family of Austrian Jewish descent. Justice Louis Brandeis was his uncle by marriage. His hen a Seattle jury recently found 10 men and one woman guilty of conspiracy to bring about a white racist revolution, Assistant U.S.

Attorney Gene Wilson said the verdict in the Order trial sends a message that you cant do things like this. The government, Wilson added, is capable of dealing with people who choose to do that. But late last month, as the Order trial was drawing to a close, David Rice, a 27-year-old unemployed steelworker, entered the home of Seattle attorney Charles A. Goldmark. Brandishing a toy pistol, Rice bound and chloroformed Goldmark; his wife, Annie; and their two boys, Derek, 12, and Colin, 10.

He then stabbed and savagely beat the four. Annie Gold-mark died immediately, Colin and Charles a few days later. Derek Goldmark still clings to life in a Seattle hospital. Rice, who has been charged with first-degree murder, told police he acted in the mistaken belief that Goldmark was a Jew and a communist. David Rice believed the Goldmarks were communistically inclined, Randy Rice, his brother, later told reporters.

Rice believed the Goldmarks were, as his brother puts it, communistically inclined because the Goldmark family had been hounded by a right-wing smear campaign that began during the McCarthy era, 20 A WEEKLY January 24-30, 1986.