INVESTIGATIONS: Out of a Man’s Past

Seattle newspapers ran headlines when gentlemanly John Stenhouse, chairman of the suburban Mercer Island school board, last month told a congressional hearing that had summoned him as a witness: “I was a member of the Communist Party.” For two painful hours Stenhouse, 47, related the story of his past. The son of a British trader, he had worked at the family business in China until the war, then fled with his American-born wife to Los Angeles, where he tried to sell Chinese antiques. When his business failed, he became a machinist, got into war production—and into bad company. “We had no friends,” he said, trying to explain. “We groped to get roots.”

Led by Communists in his union, the United Auto Workers, he joined party discussion groups. “They seemed,” he said, “to be people like myself.” He signed a party card (“It had long, patriotic slogans”), and when he got a Washington job in Henry Wallace’s Commerce Department, he went to “three or five” more meetings. In 1946 he quit the party. “The changing time was impressing itself on me,” he said, “and I felt those people were going off on entirely the wrong track, excusing the Soviet Union and criticizing the U.S.”

“Throw Him Out!” The House Un-American Activities Subcommittee was not especially interested in the story that it had drawn from Stenhouse. The committee moved on, but that was not the end of the story for John Stenhouse or the 9,000 people of Mercer Island, a pleasant place (connected to Seattle by a mile-long floating bridge) where he settled with his wife and two daughters in 1951. There had ended his groping for roots. He built a simple, cedar-sided house among the madrona trees, opened an insurance agency in the business district. He was ending his second year in the unpaid and honored job of school-board chairman (supervising the island’s three schools, with 52 teachers and 1,350 pupils) when the story of his Communist past broke.

Mercer Island divided bitterly over Stenhouse. Three of his four fellow board members called on him to resign. “Personally,” he said, “I’d rather resign and crawl into a hole somewhere.” Late last month some 250 islanders thronged to a meeting in the Mercer Crest School to discuss the issue. As Stenhouse listened, 38 of his neighbors spoke varying opinions. “Let’s rise on our hind legs and throw him out!” cried one. “Our American schools must be kept free of even a suspicion that they may be guided along Communistic lines,” said a local veterans’ leader. “

Let Us Judge . . .” But mostly, the people of Mercer Island wanted Stenhouse to stay despite the record disclosed by the House Subcommittee’s visit. “We urge,” said a spokesman for the county Young Republicans, “that individuals who have made candid and complete disclosures be given every fair consideration.” Pleaded a doctor: “Let us judge a man for what he is and not for what he has been. Let us cherish a man’s right to his past and respect what he has come to be in the present.” Stenhouse spoke last at the school-house meeting. “I realize I made a mistake,” he said. “I believe we have the power to show people throughout the world that we have a better way than the Communists.”

By last week John Stenhouse, one of the 750,000 mostly anonymous Americans who at some time in their lives joined the Communist Party, had made his decision. For the time being at least, he was going to stick it out on Mercer Island and on the school board. “In the long run,” he said, “I suppose this is just one of those things you have to live out.”