Background (circa 1917) met young Jaffe in New York Philip Jaffe was born in Mogileb near
Poltava, Russian Empire on March 20, 1895. His father, Morris Jaffe, was a Russian-speaking Jewish lumberjack. Morris moved to the United States in 1904, temporarily leaving his family in
Ekaterinoslav, where Philip attended a Jewish school and experienced a pogrom in 1905. His father, who had found work as a plasterer, sent for Philip and his mother to join him on the
Lower East Side of
Manhattan in New York City. Jaffe reached New York City in 1906 with his mother and three younger siblings. Jaffe attended
Townsend Harris Hall, a very selective three-year secondary school, graduating in 1913. Jaffe studied electrical engineering at
Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute for a year, then in 1914 transferred to
City College of New York. He met
Jay Lovestone, who would become General Secretary of the
Communist Party USA (CPUSA). He was suspended for low grades, and for a short period studied at
Columbia University.
Career After dropping out of university, Jaffe worked for the garment industry Board of Control, then found work as a messenger for Alexander Newmark, who ran a classified advertisement agency and was active in the Socialist Party. In 1915 Jaffe joined the
Socialist Party of America. Philip was briefly in the
United States Army in October–November 1918. After being discharged he enrolled at Columbia again, studying during the day and continuing to work for Newmark at night. He earned a bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1920 and a master's in English literature in 1921. He had been offered a teaching position at the
University of Wisconsin when Agnes relapsed and had to return to the sanatorium. Jaffe went back into business and entered a partnership with Wallace Brown, a stationery distributor. Jaffe became a US citizen on May 4, 1923. The partners fell out, and Jaffe took full control of the Wallace Brown Corporation. It diversified into selling greeting cards via mail order and using housewives to sell the cards door to door, and by the early 1930s was a profitable business.
Early political activity introduced Jaffe to Communism and co-edited
China Today In 1929 Jaffe met
Chi Ch'ao-ting (Ji Chaoding), who had married Jaffe's cousin, Harriet Levine, in 1927. Chi had just returned from Moscow, where he had been a translator for the Chinese delegation to the 6th congress of the
Communist International. He had settled in New York City and had joined the Chinese Bureau of the CPUSA. Chi introduced Jaffe to communism and sparked his interest in China. Jaffe joined the
International Labor Defense (ILD) in 1931 at Chi's urging, and contributed to the ILD journal
Labor Defender. During the 1930s Chi Ch'ao-ting was a graduate student at Columbia University, studying economics. He was influenced by the German Communist emigre
Karl August Wittfogel. Chi's 1936 dissertation on
Key Economic Areas in Chinese History won the Seligman Economics Prize. From 1933 until 1945 Jaffe was known as president of a successful company who was also an editor, lecturer, member of the board of various companies and respected by academics and government officials. He was prominent in left-wing political circles and associated with the CPUSA although never a member. He was a close friend of Communists such as the party leader
Earl Browder, and linked with groups connected to the CPUSA such as the
China Aid Society, the League of Soviet American Friendship, and the American Friends of the Chinese People (AFCP). Jaffe attended the first meeting of the AFCP in May 1933. He later wrote, "Except for me, all those present were obviously Communist Party members. Nevertheless, or perhaps because of this, soon after the meeting I became the Executive Secretary ... and editor of its organ
China Today." According to Jaffe, from its first publication dated September 7, 1933, the magazine consisted mainly of "rewrites of material (we) received on rice paper from the
Chinese Communist Party underground in
Shanghai." The three editors were Jaffe, who wrote under the pseudonym J.W. Phillips, Chi Ch'ao-ting, who mainly used the name Hansu Chan, and
T. A. Bisson, who wrote as Frederick Spencer. Chi was a friend of
K. P. Chen and through him later gained inside information about the
Kuomintang. Jaffe collaborated with his friend
Frederick Vanderbilt Field to set up the journal
Amerasia in 1937 as a more moderate and less openly Communist successor to
China Today. However, Jaffe continued to present the Communist party line in
Amerasia. interpreted for Jaffe in his meetings with
Mao Zedong,
Zhu De and
Zhou Enlai After launching
Amerasia, in April 1937 Jaffe and his wife left for a four-month visit to the Far East. In Beijing they connected with T.A. Bisson, who had won a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship to study there. They found a small group of Westerners interested in the Chinese Communist movement including
Edgar Snow and his wife
Helen (Peggy),
Owen Lattimore and
Karl August Wittfogel. Snow had arranged for Lattimore, Bisson and Wittfogel to visit
Yan'an, headquarters of the Communists. Wittfogel dropped out of the expedition and the Jaffes replaced him, leaving on May 17, 1937. The Jaffe party arrived in Yan'an in mid-June in a 1924 Chevrolet with a Scandinavian driver. There they met
Agnes Smedley and Peggy Snow, and talked with the Communist party leaders
Mao Zedong,
Zhu De and
Zhou Enlai.
Huang Hua, who interpreted for them, was later the Chinese Foreign Minister. Jaffe probed Mao's commitment and fidelity to the party line. His report on the visit appeared in
The New Masses, the CPUSA organ. In August 1940
Amerasia published an article by Lattimore in which he predicted that China would win the
Sino-Japanese War and would evict the colonial powers from their concessions in China. In turn Indochina, Indonesia, Malaya and India would seek and gain independence from the European colonial powers. Lattimore concluded, "What America must decide is whether to back a Japan that is bound to lose, or a China that is bound to win."
Amerasia affair claimed there was a cover-up with
Amerasia. By 1945
Amerasia had a circulation of about 2,000 and was published on an irregular schedule. {{cite news The FBI watched Jaffe and the
Amerasia office for nearly three months. The voluminous FBI reports on the surveillance include data from wiretaps, hidden microphones and physical observations. On April 20, 1945,
John S. Service of the State Department gave Jaffe a document at the
Statler Hotel in
Washington, D.C. The FBI report of their hidden microphone recording of this meeting said, "Service ... apparently gave Jaffe a document which dealt with matters the [Nationalist] Chinese had furnished to the United States government in confidence. Service stated that the person with whom he was associated in China would 'get his neck pretty badly wrung' if the information got out." Service later said he thought Jaffe was just a journalist, and let him have some memos he had written while in China about the
Kuomintang forces and the Communists. On June 6, 1945, FBI agents arrested Jaffe, his co-editor Kate Louise Mitchell, the journalist
Mark Gayn, John Service and Emmanuel Sigurd Larsen of the State Department, and Andrew Roth of the
Office of Naval Intelligence, and seized the
Amerasia papers, including many government documents. The charge was espionage based on possession of classified government documents concerning US policy in China. However, the OSS had burgled the
Amerasia office and the homes of several of the accused, so the evidence was tainted. A grand jury decided there was insufficient basis for criminal charges against Mitchell, Gayn and Service. The jury said the papers Service had given to Jaffe were not classified. Jaffe, Roth and Larsen were indicted for stealing, receiving or concealing Government documents, but not for espionage. The court hearing was held quietly on a Saturday morning. Jaffe pleaded guilty and was fined $2,500, an amount he paid immediately. Larsen was later fined $500, which was paid by Jaffe, and the charges against Roth were dropped. The
Amerasia case was reviewed in 1946 by a House Judiciary subcommittee chaired by representative
Sam Hobbs. The FBI and Department of Justice tried to cover up the mistakes which had led to most charges being dropped. Senator
Joseph McCarthy revived interest in the case as part of his campaign against Communists in the State Department. In 1950 the case was investigated by the Senate Foreign Relations Subcommittee on the Investigation of Loyalty of State Department Employees. Republican Senators including
Bourke B. Hickenlooper claimed that the Administration had been covering up the
Amerasia case, and the documents contained important secret information. Assistant Attorney General James M. Mclnerney downplayed their importance and said "Hickenlooper is '100% wrong.. The records were declassified and the Justice Department delivered 1,260 documents to the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee in 1956 and 1957.
Later years helped arrange the 1937 trip to
Yan'an Jaffe and Field were among the founders of the
Committee for a Democratic Far Eastern Policy in August 1945, which opposed the policy of
Harry S. Truman's administration to support
Chiang Kai-shek and his Kuomintang government in China.
Amerasia, losing money and subject to mounting attacks by anti-communist agitators, closed down in 1947. The final issue consisted entirely of Jaffe's article
America: The Uneasy Victor. Jaffe said he now supported Truman for President, alienating many former friends who followed the CPUSA line and supported
Henry A. Wallace. Jaffe's company would gross $5–6 million per year at its peak in the late 1940s and early 1950s. In the late 1940s both Jaffe and Field severed their connections with the CPUSA and its associated organizations. In 1947 his translation of Chiang Kai-shek's manifesto, ''China's Destiny'' was published together with his own critical commentary on the text. In 1950, when asked in a congressional hearing whether he had traveled to China and had known Owen Lattimore and other figures, Jaffe claimed his privilege under the Fifth Amendment and was cited for contempt. During the peak of McCarthyism in 1951–52 the
Tydings Committee subpoenaed Jaffe, and subsequently charged him with contempt of Congress, but Jaffe avoided any further punishment. Service asked that the Tydings hearings be open to the press and public. He told the committee in detail of his friendly relations with Jaffe, and said he had loaned Jaffe nine or ten memos he had written which were "factual in nature and did not contain discussion of United States political or military policy." He said he had probably been indiscreet but was certainly not guilty of treason, and was neither a Communist nor a Communist sympathizer. After his acquittal by the Tydings committee the FBI interviewed Jaffe at length four times. On September 26, 1954, the day before a grand jury investigating Field was due to adjourn after finding nothing significant,
Walter Winchell claimed on the radio that Jaffe had made "a sensational statement to the FBI." Jaffe had in fact said nothing, but the grand jury voted to indict Field the next day. Although the
Amerasia case remained controversial in the academic world and in politics, Jaffe gradually faded from public attention. Browder, the Jaffes and some others continued to meet and discuss politics in a group called the "Koffee Klatsch" until Browder's death in 1973. Jaffe wrote a book,
The Rise and Fall of American Communism (1975), in which he drew on his access through Browder to the party's internal discussions and memos. He wrote an autobiography, "Odyssey of a Fellow Traveler," completed in 1978 but never published. Jaffe wrote in it, "As I 'look back on us', I recognize that many still romanticize the radicalism of the thirties without acknowledging its absurdities, illusions and self-deceptions." ==Private life and death==