Ireene Wicker was a radio star
whose children’s programs in the
late 1930's and early 40's, was consistently placed first in juvenile
entertainment by radio editors. More than 25 million children listened to her
regularly.
As
radio faded, she was given a children’s television show that ran on ABC
from November 1948 to August 1950, called The Singing Lady. The show was
sponsored by Kellogg Cereal.
In 195o, Counter Attack, an
anti-Soviet publication listed Wicker as having signed a petition on behalf of
a Communist candidate because the Communist Party newspaper, The Daily Worker,
had reported her name among the signatures.
In 1950 Wicker was one of several
broadcasters whose name was included in Red Channels because she had supposedly
sponsored a re-election committee for Benjamin J. Davis, a Communist
councilman in New York. Wicker denied having ever heard of Davis, a doubtful
claim.
Wicker’s army of lawyers obtained
a court order to identify all 30,000 names on the Daily Worker petition. Counterattack
admitted they had made a mistake about Wicker but pointed out that it was the
Daily Worker who ere the first to report the wrong information. The Daily
Worker later apologized to Wicker.
It was all very messy, especially
since Wicker’s show was directed to American children. Kellogg didn’t renew her
option for the ABC TV Show. She was
handed another show by ABC in 1953 but it lasted only one year due to poor
rating. The fact is, a woman humming children’s tunes (She rarely actually sang
despite the title) and telling stories was boring. Television demand more action than radio did
and once again, her sponsors pulled the plug…..not the government and not the
network.
Wicker never lost her radio American
Broadcasting syndicated radio program. In total, she was off the air for 24 months.
But how far from the Party was
Wicker?
Her second husband was Victor J.
Hammer, brother and partner to industrialist Armand Hammer. They couple were married in 1941. In 1937, the
left leaning Time magazine described the brothers as “….both friends of Soviet Russia.”
Here’s why; Their father one of the founders of the American Communist Labor
Party. In Moscow, on May 27, l922, after Lenin met Armand Hammer he sent a
secret message to Joseph Stalin, the newly appointed General Secretary of the
Communist Party, instructing him and the Politburo to give their ''particular
support'' to a young American and his trading venture. Lenin explained: ''This
is a small path to the American 'business' world and this path should be made use
of in every way.''
Hammer and his brother went on the create
a business empire by negotiating extraordinary deals with Russia while Russia
was hostile to the United States. The brothers maintained strong relations with
Soviet leaders for more than half a century, providing Moscow with a vital link
to Western industry and technology. So much so that Soviet leader Leonid I.
Brezhnev gave Hammer a luxurious Moscow apartment, and Kremlin officials have
proposed that he be named United States ambassador to the Soviet Union.
The request caused one member of the
President's inner circle to say, ''We simply don't know which side of the fence
Hammer is on.''
Hammer claims that his Soviet
connection “grew out of his philanthropic intentions and a series of innocent
accidents.” According to him, after he
graduated from medical school in 1921, Hammer, a medical Doctor, went to Russia
to study the causes famine that Russia was under and assist in the control of
the epidemic. When he saw the extent of the famine, he offered to buy wheat for
the Soviet Government. He says that Lenin, hearing of his offer, invited him to
the Kremlin, and told him: ''We do not need doctors, we need businessmen
...Communism is not working, and we must change to a New Economic Policy.''
And then, out of the clear blue, Lenin
offered him a concession for mining asbestos in the Urals and another for
organizing Soviet foreign trade - the first foreign concessions ever in the
Soviet Union.
However the real story behind
Hammer's concessions goes much deeper. According to State Department and Army
intelligence files suggest that the Soviet arrangement actually began with
Hammer's father, Julius Hammer, an immigrant from Russia, who was a dedicated supporter
of Lenin and the Communist Party. According to one account, Julius named Armand
after the arm-and-hammer symbol of the Socialist Labor Party. Julius Hammer,
also a doctor by training, had built a prosperous business in New York, selling
shampoos, medicinal alcohols and pharmaceutical drugs. Julius Hammer also
became a financial supporter of radical causes, and it was in this capacity
that he established his connections with the Soviet Union.
Russia needed a western connection. After
Lenin seized power in 1917, Washington not only refused to recognize his
Government until 1933 effectively cut
off Moscow's access to all its gold and currency reserves in the United States.
As a result the Soviet Government could not buy the supplies it desperately needed
to retain power. Lenin appointed a German-Russian engineer named Ludwig C.A.K.
Martens to go to the US with the mission of organizing shipments of supplies to
the Soviet Union. Since Martens could not get control of the Russian funds
immediately, he turned to Julius Hammer for interim financing.
Hammer paid the rent and other
expenses of Martens's unofficial ''Soviet Bureau'' in New York and as a reward
was officially appointed ''commercial attaché'' of the Soviet Bureau, and also
was given an exclusive license for Russian trade with the United States.
In 1918, the Soviet Union was
financing the US based 'Soviet Bureau' by smuggling diamonds into New York.
Julius Hammer converted those diamonds into cash to finance the purchase of
Soviet supplies, although Armand Hammer always denied that was true.
Julius Hammer organized and held
equity in the Allied Drug and Chemical Company, (later evolved into the Allied
American Corporation.) Allied Drug provided the Soviet Bureau with a channel
for shipping medical and other supplies to Baltic ports, from where they were
reshipped into Russia. According to an informant for the Justice Department,
the corporation was 50 percent owned by Martens, presumably on behalf of the
Soviet Government. On that information, the Department of Justice and other Federal
intelligence agencies kept the entire operation under close surveillance, even
attempting to infiltrate it.
In 1921, the Government deported
Martens and closed his bureau, Julius Hammer was arrested, tried, convicted and
sentenced to three years in prison for performing an illegal abortion that
resulted in the death of the wife of a Russian diplomat.
With Julius Hammer in prison and
Martens back in the Soviet Union, Armand Hammer went to Russia and met with Lenin,
but first met with h Martens, who had been appointed to the Supreme Economic
Council, to discuss the resumption of shipments through his corporation.
Martens introduced Hammer to Boris Reinstein, who was in charge of organizing
the Department of International Propaganda. Reinstein, who was working on a new
political initiative to attract foreign capital to the Soviet Union, accompanied
Hammer to Lenin's office in the Kremlin. When asked about Reinstein's interest
in him, Hammer said that he merely brought Reinstein along to see Lenin as a
''translator'' however, Lenin spoke fluent English.
In October 1921, Lenin wrote Martens,
instructing him to give Hammer a contract for some kind of concession ''even if
a fictitious one, of asbestos or any other Ural valuables or whatever you will.
What we want to show and have in print ... is that the Americans have gone in
for concessions. This is important politically.'' He also ordered Martens to
get maximum publicity for the concession. Hammer's 'concessions' included not
only the asbestos mine but the extraordinary right to act as agent for Soviet
trade with the United States.
Lenin wrote in his secret message to
Stalin and the Politburo, that the Hammer enterprise was a ''path'' to American
business that was to be used ''in every way.'' Hammer succeeded in recruiting at
least 38 corporations to supply Russia with everything from machinery to
agricultural equipment. Hammer also became the agent for the Ford Motor
Company's tractors in the Soviet Union and arranged for Russian engineers to
come to the United States to study Ford's techniques of mass production. Hammer also lived in the Soviet Union for the
better part of a decade and married a Russian singer named Olga Vadina, who was
one of the leading entertainers in the capital. His father later lived in
Russia as well.
British Intelligence was also watching
Allied American after a raid on Soviet House in London in 1927. A State
Department intelligence report later noted, ''Dr. Julius Hammer was prohibited
entry into the United Kingdom as a political agent and (as) the controlling
personage of the Allied American Corporation which was used as a cover for the
transmission of Soviet funds to American revolutionary organizations.''
Armand
and Victor were partners in several ventures including Hammer Galleries in New
York City, founded in 1928 as a way to funnel profits made in Soviet Russia out
of that country although British Intelligence was convinced Hammer Galleries
was a front for Soviet Intelligence
Later, in the early 1960s, Khrushchev
o told Hammer that the Soviet Union needed billions of dollars’ worth of
phosphorus-based fertilizers for its agriculture. Hammer returned to the United
States and began buying up the components necessary for a fertilizer business
including buying Interore (International
Ore and Fertilizer Corporation), then the largest fertilizer trading company in
the United States; Best Fertilizer, a producer of ammonia, and the Jefferson
Lake Sulphur Company. He also acquired vast tracts of phosphate deposits in
north Florida.
In 1968 when the Communist military junta
took over Peru, Hammer assisted the new Government by depositing $25 million of
Occidental funds in Peruvian banks.