Labor supporter Budenz's role in the labor movement began from a Catholic perspective. In 1915, working with the
Central Bureau of the Roman Catholic Central Verein, a reform-minded and social justice-oriented organization in
St. Louis, he published
A List of Books for the Study of the Social Question: Being an Introduction to Catholic Social Literature. In 1920, Budenz moved to
Rahway, New Jersey, where he worked for the
ACLU (NY) as publicity director. In 1924 and into the early 1930s, Budenz was managing editor of the monthly magazine
Labor Age. He advised striking workers at a hosiery mill in
Kenosha, Wisconsin, in 1928; at a silk workers' strike
Paterson, New Jersey, in 1930; and the
Toledo Auto-Lite strike in 1934. He taught labor organizing and strike management at
Brookwood Labor College outside New York City. By 1938, he had been arrested on more than 20 occasions. That same year, he became editor of a new Communist daily in Chicago, the
Midwest Daily Record, part of a "cross-country alliance of Communist dailies, between the San Francisco ''
People's World'' ... and New York City's ...
Daily Worker", at a time when there were more than 700 labor papers in America. Formerly the author of numerous articles and pamphlets in support of Communist causes, after 1945 Budenz wrote several books relating his criticisms and antipathy towards Communism. He became a professor of economics at the
University of Notre Dame and later taught at
Fordham University, in addition to working as a syndicated columnist and lecturer. In 1947, he wrote an autobiography,
This Is My Story.
Paid expert witness From 1946, Budenz began to testify about Communists such as
Gerhart Eisler (former husband of Soviet spy
Hede Massing, who would testify in the second trial of the
Hiss Case). A day after "Confrontation Day" (August 25, 1948) in the Hiss Case, Budenz testified before the HCOUA that the Communist Party "regarded him always" ("him" being
Alger Hiss) as a party member The reliability of his testimony came was questioned because, in all of his 3,000 hours of debriefing before the FBI (1946–1949), Budenz had never mentioned Lattimore's name. In 1951, Budenz once more testified against Lattimore, this time before the hearings of the
Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, headed by Senator
Pat McCarran. During this second testimony against Lattimore, Budenz claimed Lattimore was both a Soviet agent and secret Communist. At one point in the late 1940s he testified, according to one account, "that the fact that a man denied he was a Communist might prove he was a communist since all Communists had instructions to deny it."
McCarthy summation In 1952, Senator McCarthy praised Budenz for having "testified in practically every case in which Communists were either convicted or deported over the past three years; one of the key witnesses who testified against... Communist leaders." In his 1953 book
Techniques of Communism, Budenz wrote a subsection on Professor
Frederick L. Schuman in a chapter on "Affecting Public Opinion." Budenz asserted that Schuman was a CPUSA member in the 1930s and 1940s. Citing
Eugene Lyons' 1941 book
Red Decade, Budenz asserted that Schuman had supported CPUSA head
William Z. Foster's bid for the US presidency (1932), traveled to and lectured in the USSR (1933–4), extolled US-USSR friendship at a Carnegie Hall gala (1936), called for closer Soviet ties in an open letter in the
Daily Worker (1939), and supported alleged Soviet spy
Gerhart Eisler (1946). He cites several books by Schuman as being subversive:
American Policy Toward Russia Since 1917,
American Politics at Home and Abroad (error for
Soviet Politics at Home and Abroad?), and
The Commonwealth of Man. He also listed "Communist fronts" to which Schuman belong. In sum, Budenz claimed, Schuman had "done tremendous damage" to the US. (Budenz also notes that Schuman had attacked ex-communists who had testified for the US government, "particularly
Whittaker Chambers, Louis Budenz, and
Elizabeth Bentley.") {{cite book ==Personal life and death==