Paul Draper: 

Targeted Tap Dancer

Paul Draper was yet another target of McCarthy-era attacks who found a brief refuge in Ridgefield. An international dancing star who was called “the aristocrat of tap,” Draper danced on the major stages of Europe and the United States with top stars of the 1930s and 40s.

He wound up in exile in Europe but unlike his close friend, harmonica virtuoso and fellow Ridgefielder and McCarthy victim, Larry Adler,  Draper returned to the United States to teach, dance and choreograph new works. 

“Draper brought cool intellectualism and playful wit to the dance form,” said The New York Times. “He performed everything from jazz to the bossa nova to Brahms and Scarlatti, establishing a style very different from that of Bill (Bojangles) Robinson, Fred Astaire and the Nicholas Brothers.”

Paul Draper was born in 1909 in Florence, Italy, into an artistic, socially prominent New York City family. His mother Muriel Draper was a writer and lecturer whose later home in London hosted such guests as Pablo Picasso, Henry James and Arthur Rubinstein. Novelist Norman Douglas promised a young Paul a penny every time he was naughty.

From a young age he loved to dance and mostly self-taught himself tap — he reportedly took only six lessons in his life. 

After teaching briefly at an Arthur Murray studio in Manhattan as a teenager, Draper moved to London, hoping to find work in tap dancing. “He scraped together a living performing flashy routines in Europe and the United States, then enrolled in the School of American Ballet and realized the possibilities of combining tap and classical ballet,” said entertainment historian David Lobosco. Draper got into the school with the help of his mother’s friend, George Balanchine.

He made his solo debut in London in 1932, introducing his new “ballet-tap” technique.  His career blossomed in the 1930s as he performed in Europe and the U.S. with his combination of tap dancing and ballet. He headlined at famous night spots like the Rainbow Room and Plaza Hotel’s Persian Room, danced at Carnegie Hall, and appeared in the 1948 film “Time of Your Life.” His greatest fame was perhaps as part of a two-man act formed in 1940 with harmonica  virtuoso Larry Adler, who also lived in Ridgefield around the same time Draper did.

Draper began coming to Ridgefield in late 1940s. A note in the May 5, 1949, Press said, “Mr. and Mrs. Paul Draper and family of New York City have leased ‘The Coach House’ on Branchville Road for a year from Miss Marthe Krueger... Mr. Draper is a well-known dancer in New York. The family spent a summer here recently in the guest cottage at the former Paul Palmer estate on Wilton Road East.” (Marthe Krueger was an international concert dance star and choreographer who had a teaching studio on Branchville Road in the “Old Coach House” of the former Hawk estate.)

Draper’s career hit the same rocks that sank many artistic talents of the era: anti-communist blacklisting. Two other local notables of the day — a leftist presidential candidate and a right-wing newspaper columnist — were involved.

Draper’s leftist leanings were no secret, and he publicly supported the 1948 presidential campaign of Progressive Party candidate Henry Wallace, a former vice president under Franklin D. Roosevelt. Wallace lived just across the line in South Salem and attended St. Stephen’s Church here.

Draper was active in liberal or progressive causes. He served as a spokesman for a committee of actors, producers and writers who opposed an inquiry by the House Committee on Un-American Activities into Communist infiltration of the film industry, The New York Times said. “Mr. Draper had performed in benefits to raise money for groups and causes labeled as subversive by the committee.” 

A Los Angeles Times report noted that “Mr. Draper said he was a supporter of several organizations which had been called subversive by the U.S. Attorney General’s office, but steadfastly denied any communist affiliations.”

Then there was the “Draper-McCullough case,” which drew national attention in the early 1950s. It was later described by The Press: “A woman in Greenwich [Mrs. John T. McCullough] called dancer Paul Draper a Communist and Mr. Draper, who lived in Ridgefield, sued the woman for libel and — in line with Connecticut’s attachment law of that day — attached the property of Mrs. McCullough. This latter move aroused the ire of the Right Wing to an almost eerie extent, those espousing Mrs. McCullough’s cause appearing not to be prepared to recognize what Mrs. McCullough’s charges had done to Mr. Draper’s career.” 

The power of the anti-communist blacklisting of the era was described in the L.A. Times obituary: “In 1950, Mr. Draper’s dance routine was snipped out of a CBS segment from Ed Sullivan’s  Toast of the Town’ because the network received protests. His bookings were also canceled on other TV programs and at several upscale hotels around the country.”

Among those brandishing Mrs. McCullough’s banner was nationally syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler, who also lived in Ridgefield. The Press didn’t like Pegler and a 1950 editorial supporting Draper began: “We dislike mentioning the name of Westbrook Pegler in the Press because we have a certain pride in keeping our paper free of evil things. But now and then there is a tide which must be taken at the flood.”

The trial ended in a hung jury and, dejected, Draper left Ridgefield in 1951 to live in Switzerland. Soon after, his friend and frequent partner Larry Adler, also subjected to anti-communist attacks, moved from Ridgefield to England where he died in 2001. 

 Unlike Adler, however, Draper returned to the States and became a professor at the Carnegie-Mellon Institute in the 1970s. In the words of The New York Times, he “continued to be recognized as an important, if seldom seen, figure in concert dance.” His career never recovered from the blacklisting, though he did continue to occasionally perform. He also wrote the 1978 book, “On Tap Dancing.”

He died in 1996 at his home in Woodstock, N.Y., at the age of 86.

Paul Draper never denied belonging to the leftist organizations that the right accused him of supporting. “I did do the things and belong to the organizations they said,” The New York Times quoted him as saying in 1980. “I was happy to and am still proud of it.”

But he always denied ever having been a communist.

Howard Fast: 

Prolific Novelist

Ridgefield has been home to countless writers, but few as prolific as Howard Fast. 

The high school dropout published his first novel before he was 20 and by the turn of the 21st Century, had written more than 80 books of fiction and nonfiction under his own name and a series of mysteries as E.V. Cunningham. Literally millions of copies of Fast titles have been printed in a dozen languages, and many have stayed in print for years. 

Despite all this output, he took the time out to write a regular column for his local paper.v“Howard is bored to death when he's not writing,” said his wife, Bette, in a 1989 Ridgefield Press interview. 

Born in 1914 in New York City, the son of a factory worker,  Fast produced his first novel, “Two Valleys,” in 1933 when he was 18 years old and hitching rides around the country, looking for work. 

Six years later, when he was 24, his novel about Valley Forge, “Conceived in Liberty,” was published, sold a   million copies and was translated into more than 10 languages.

During World War II, he wrote copy for the Voice of America, working for the U.S. Office of War Information. 

Because of the poverty his family experienced when he was a child, he said,  he joined the Communist Party in 1943, a fact that later got him blacklisted; even his famous patriotic book, “Citizen Tom Paine” (1943), long a classroom classic, was banned for a while in the New York City schools because he was a communist. 

He was jailed for three months in 1950 for refusing to disclose some names before the House Committee on Un-American Activities. In 1952, he ran for Congress on the American Labor Party ticket.

Because he was blacklisted, he had to self-publish what became probably his most famous book, “Spartacus.” He also wrote the screenplay of the Stanley Kubrick movie starring starring Kirk Douglas with score by Ridgefielder Alex North. (North also wrote the music for “Cheyenne Autumn,” made from Fast’s novel, “The Last Frontier.”)

Most of his books were historical novels, many of them based on true stories. Another was “Freedom Road,” which was turned into a 1979 TV mini-series starring Muhammad Ali as an ex-slave who became a U.S. senator.

In 1956, he broke with the Communist Party and began a renewed career.  “I was part of a generation that believed in socialism and finally found that belief corroded and destroyed," The New York Times reported him saying in 1981. “That is not renouncing Communism or socialism. It's reaching a certain degree of enlightenment about what the Soviet Union practices. To be dogmatic about a cause you believe in at the age of 20 or 30 is not unusual. But to be dogmatic at age 55 or 60 shows a lack of any learning capacity.”

Fast lived on Florida Hill Road in the 1960s and early 1970s when he moved to Redding, and among the books he wrote while here was “The Hessian” (1972), a Revolutionary War novel set in and around Ridgefield. As are several of his classics, it is still taught in many schools today. 

Among his other popular books are “April Morning” and “The Immigrants.”  

Over his lifetime he also wrote stage plays, screenplays, television plays, poetry, non-fiction books for children, popular political biographies including two books on Yugoslavia's Marshal Tito, and a history of the Jews.

In 1980, the Fasts moved to Greenwich where he died in 2003 at the age of 88.

“The only thing that infuriates me,” he once said, “is that I have more unwritten stories in me than I can conceivably write in a lifetime.” 

Larry Adler: 

Harmonica Virtuoso

Harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler lived here during a difficult part of his life. 

It was the late 40s and early 50s when the House Un-American Activities Committee sought out suspected communists, and a Greenwich woman had publicly claimed that Adler and his friend and longtime performance partner, dancer Paul Draper, had been communists. The story made national headlines,  and syndicated Columnist Westbrook Pegler of Ridgefield joined in the accusations against Adler and Draper.

Adler denied supporting the communist cause, but refused to take a loyalty oath and vociferously criticized the House Unamerican Activities Committee. He and Draper filed a libel suit against the Greenwich woman who had accused them, but the trial ended in a hung jury. The ensuing case was dismissed because Adler and Draper did not have the funds to continue it.

Born in Baltimore in 1914, Lawrence Cecil Adler taught himself the harmonica and was playing professionally by the age of 14. In 1927, he won a contest sponsored by The Baltimore Sun, playing a Beethoven minuet. About a year later, only 15 years old, he went to New York City where, with the help of singer Rudy Vallée, he began working as a vaudeville performer.

Over his long career he has performed everything from classical to jazz and pop music. He brought the “mouth organ” to the serious stage, gained worldwide recognition as a musician, and performed with leading symphony orchestras worldwide. Many works for harmonica were written with him in mind, including Ralph Vaughan Williams' “Romance in D-flat for Harmonica, Piano and String Orchestra.”

During World War II he entertained the troops on many USO tours with comedian Jack Benny. 

Adler, who lived at the James Waterman Wise home on Pumping Station Road (Paul Draper also stayed there), wrote several film scores including “High Wind in Jamaica” and  “Genevieve”; for the latter, written while he was in Ridgefield, he received an Academy Award nomination in 1953. Because he was blacklisted, his name was originally kept off the film’s credits in this country, but was eventually added; he still made a sizable amount of money from “Genevieve.”

He also appeared in five movies in the 1930s and early 40s.

In 1952, discouraged with the communist witch hunt, he moved to England from which continued to give concerts around the world, make recordings, write books, and even work as a food critic for a British magazine. He wrote “Jokes and How to Tell Them” (1963) — one of his oft-quoted lines is, “Vasectomy means never having to say you’re sorry.”   His autobiography, “It Ain't Necessarily So,” was published in 1985. He died in 2001.

A biographer once observed that Adler is “a good example of the adage, ‘Living well is the best revenge.’” 

Robert Wohlforth: 

Writer and Publisher

Robert Wohlforth was a journalist, novelist, government investigator, and publisher. And he was a successful survivor of attacks during the McCarthy era.

Born in 1904 in Lakewood, N.J., Robert M. Wohlforth attended Princeton University (where many of his papers now reside) and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point  in 1927. He served for a short time as an officer of the 18th Infantry, but was unhappy with the military and soon resigned.

In the late l920’s he worked for the New York Daily Telegraph as a reporter and theater critic, but also began to write articles critical of the military establishment. In one piece, which appeared in “The North American Review” in August 1934, he pointed out that the Army spent $2 million annually feeding mules and only $495,000 for armored vehicles.  

In 1934 he also published “Tin Soldiers,” an unflattering novel about cadet life at West Point. A New York Times review of the novel observed: “Mr. Wohlforth says he resigned from the army in 1928 because he was unable to keep up with the ‘straight-alcohol-and-ginger-ale drinkers’ at Fort Slocum, Camp Dix and Fort Jay, but it is obvious from the internal evidence of his novel that liquor had little to do with his distaste for the martial life. An individualist, he must have hated the routine of West Point, even in his relatively free upper-class-years.”
Wohlforth also wrote a series of reminiscences for the New Yorker, called “My Nickelodeon Childhood,”  recounting his experiences as a boy helping his father operate one of the first movie theaters on the New Jersey shore.

In 1934 he joined the staff of the U.S. Senate’s Nye Committee, which spent several years investigating the “merchants of death,” as the munitions industry was then called. This led to his appointment in 1936 as secretary of the La Follette Committee, which conducted a three-year investigation of labor spying, strike breaking, and other civil liberties violations that affected labor unions.  

In 1939, President Roosevelt appointed Wohlforth to the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice. When World War II broke out, he headed the War Division, which investigated an international web of economic connections among Nazi-run firms.  

He continued to work for the Justice Department until 1952, when “he was forced out of government employment by the McCarthyite witch hunt of the period,” his obituary said. Wohlforth had worked in government with people who were later identified as communists or Soviet sympathizers. 

In a 1953 piece, the caustic conservative columnist Westbrook Pegler, who had lived in

Ridgefield in the 1940s, linked Wohlforth to such people, but never claimed Wohlforth was a communist, or even disloyal. Pegler wrote of Wohlforth: “He said he had had a lot of ‘unfortunate associations,’ including professional relations on the Senate committees with Alger Hiss, John Abt and Charles Krivitsky, alias Kramer, named in sworn testimony by Elizabeth Bentley and others, as Soviet agents.”

However, Pegler continued, “Wohlforth lives at Ridgefield, Conn., formerly an ‘exclusive’ Christmas-card type of New England village which, of recent years, in common with Wilton and other scattered Connecticut communities, has become heavily infested with open and covert Reds.”

Among the Wohlforth “associations” Pegler attacked was former Vice President Henry Wallace. “He was a personal friend of the Henry Wallaces, who have a farm at South Salem where Bubblehead [Pegler’s name for Wallace] has been trying to breed a Rhode Island red to a French fried potato, but Wohlforth insists that he dropped Wallace, even socially, before he got going as the nominee of the Communists in 1948. However, they both are Episcopalians and sometimes meet in church.”

Wohlforth soon began a new career in publishing with Farrar, Straus and Giroux. He was hired by Roger Straus, a founder of the company and  became treasurer of  the publishing house, retiring in the mid-l980’s. 

A 67-year resident, Wohlforth was active in the community, and often penned light-hearted pieces for The Press, calling himself “Ridgefield’s Oldest Living Continuous Vertical Commuter.”   

He helped write the town’s first zoning ordinance and served on the Zoning Commission  for many years. 

He and his wife, Mildred, who lived in an 18th Century house on Rockwell Road, were influential in the effort to create a historic district on Main Street. He served as chairman of the Ridgefield Library board and was a director of the Nature Conservancy.

When he was working for the government, Wohlforth also helped a number of Ridgefield families of Italian ancestry in obtaining citizenship for their relatives. 

In 1977 when the town celebrated the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Ridgefield with an re-enactment, he played the part of General Benedict Arnold, one of the battle’s heroes, riding a white horse in colonial uniform.

He died in 1997 at the age of 97. Mildred, a journalist and a novelist (also profiled in Who Was Who in Ridgefield), died in 1994. They had been married for 64 years at her death.

Westbrook Pegler: 

Caustic Columnist

Westbrook Pegler, the caustic columnist who spent years attacking “Reds,” was one of a half dozen Ridgefielders whose writings have won a Pulitzer Prize. His award-winning words weren’t about communists, however, but about labor union racketeering.

Pegler lived here from 1941 to 1948 during which time he seemed better known locally for his attack on Ridgefield’s plumbing code and his efforts to collect bumpers than as a national newspaper columnist. Both these efforts occurred during World War II. 

While expanding his home on Old Stagecoach Road, Pegler wanted to use cheaper, unlicensed plumbers but the town code, modeled after the state’s and supported by unions, required the use of licensed plumbers. Pegler called it discriminatory and tried to get the Town Meeting to abandon the code. He failed. 

He was more successful in his campaign to get people to turn in their steel automobile bumpers to help the war effort – Life magazine featured a full-page picture of him removing his own bumper in front of the Ridgefield town hall. 

Francis James Westbrook Pegler was born in 1894 in Minneapolis, Minn., a son of a newspaper editor. By his early 20s, he was working for United Press and became the youngest American correspondent covering World War I. 

After the war he worked as a sports columnist for a while but, at the Chicago Tribune, soon turned to covering politics, labor, government, and other hard-news topics in a column he called “Mister Pegler.”  By the late 1930s, the column, handled by the Scripps Howard syndicate, was carried in more than 115 newspapers and had an estimated six million readers. He was making $65,000 a year — that’s about $1.1 million in today’s dollars.

Time magazine called him “the great dissenter for the common man,” adding that “Mister Pegler is invariably irritated, inexhaustibly scornful...Pegler applies himself to presidents and peanut vendors with equal zeal and skill. Dissension is his philosophy.”

Famous for his conservative, anti-Communist writings, he “used his typewriter like a meat ax,” said one critic. He criticized virtually every president, and took special aim at Franklin

Roosevelt, whom he called “Moosejaw.” (He called Eleanor  “La boca grande” — or “the big mouth.”)

“He depicted a world where a conspiracy of criminals, corrupt union officials, Communists, and their political allies in the New Deal threatened the economic freedom of working Americans,” wrote historian David Witwe in the Journal of Social History in 2003.

Pegler probably reached his peak of popularity and power in the early 1940s when he helped expose a New York City racketeer named George Scalise, a union boss who happened to own a home in Ridgefield — what is now the St. Ignatius retreat house on Tackora Trail. An associate of mobster Dutch Schultz, Scalise was arrested in 1940 by the crusading district attorney Thomas E. Dewey, later governor of New York and almost-president, and was charged with extorting $100,000 ($1.7 million today) from hotels and contracting firms. But the arrest came only after Pegler had exposed Scalise in a series of anti-racketeering columns that won him the Pulitzer Prize for reporting in 1941. It was the same year he came in third in the voting for Time magazine’s Man of the Year, behind two of his most hated targets, President Roosevelt and Joseph Stalin.

In a 1940 piece, Pegler described how Scalise had used union funds to acquire the 27-room mansion on Tackora Trail. (He also noted that just across North Salem Road was the town poor house.)

His research on Scalise probably introduced him to Ridgefield, and in 1941, he bought the 100-acre farm on Old Stagecoach Road.   

He eventually soured on the town, however. In a 1950 column, two years after he moved to Arizona, he described Ridgefield as “an old aristocratic town of moldering white mansions on a white main street” that “has quietly become infested with wealthy Sixth Columnists” (supporters of communism).

When he was in his glory years, three books of Pegler’s columns were published: “T’ain’t Right” in 1936; “The Dissenting Opinions of Mister Westbrook Pegler” in 1938; and “George Spelvin, American, and Fireside Chats” in 1942.

By the mid-1950s Pegler fell out of favor, and his columns appeared only in the magazine of the ultra-conservative John Birch Society. 

He died in 1969 in Arizona at the age of 74.