Legacy

Whatever happened to Juliet Stuart Poyntz, her sudden disappearance has served anticommunism. There were several people who claimed to know what happened, heard what happened, or lived by the assumption that Poyntz was murdered and the bad guys were communists. The reality is that for over 80 years people have been repeating the story Carlo Tresca crafted in 1938.

As the document above shows, stories circulated from the beginning that she was kidnapped and killed, or taken to a Soviet gulag, or was very much alive and still active in the underground.

In the end there was no evidence to say definitively what happened to Poyntz. This arguably fed decades of conspiracy theories that allowed people to blame communists, or Nazis, or whoever their particular enemy was. Today historians, journalists, conservatives, and others believe the story that Tresca began circulating. Few have demanded evidence, including the FBI, and fewer still worried about Poyntz herself.

In 1944, Poyntz’s sister Eulalie McClelland had Poyntz declared dead. She then collected the remainder of Poyntz’s inheritance from Frederick Glasers’ estate. Officially, Poyntz was dead.

But lost in all of the stories and rumors was Poyntz. As her life demonstrates, she was devoted to social justice. Her disappearance fed conspiracy theories that exploded in the Cold War. The theories contended that communists sought to undermine the United States and were hiding among civil rights activists and people who sought progressive change. Today accusations of socialism and communism are hurled at political enemies on a regular basis and the purpose is to stop progressive change, delegitimize antiracist and antisexist campaigns, and undermine economic justice. Anticommunism is a politics of fear and Americans continue to live in fear. This is Poyntz’s legacy and a legacy she would have rejected.