Juliet Stuart Poyntz (1886 - 1937)

Thu Nov 25, 1886

Image

Image: Juliet Stuart Poyntz circa 1918 [Wikicommons]

Juliet Stuart Poyntz, born on this day in 1886, was an American suffragist, trade unionist, and co-founder of the Communist Party United States of America (CPUSA). Later, she worked as an intelligence agent for the USSR, but disappeared in 1937.

Juliet Poyntz was born in Omaha, Nebraska and later attended Barnard College in New York City. She was a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). As a student and university teacher, Poyntz espoused many radical causes and went on to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA).

During the 1910s, Poyntz worked with the International Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU), becoming education director of the ILGWU’s Worker’s University. In the 1920s, Poyntz was on the staff of the Friends of the Soviet Union and International Labor Defense.

Poyntz also served as an intelligence agent for the Soviet Union. In 1936, Poyntz secretly traveled to Moscow to receive further instructions from Soviet authorities, and was seen there in the company of George Mink (alias Minkoff), an American later implicated in the disappearance of several Trotkskyists during the Spanish Civil War.

On June 3rd, 1937, Poyntz disappeared after leaving the American Woman’s Association Clubhouse at 353 West 57th Street in Manhattan, New York City. Multiple colleagues of Poyntz, including Benjamin Gitlow, co-founder of the CPUSA later turned reactionary, and Carlo Tresca, Italian-American anarchist, claimed Poyntz returned from her trip a critic of Stalin, having witnessed the purges from that period.

In 1938, Tresca formally accused the Soviet Union of having assassinated Poyntz, claims that were published by the New York Times. Various Soviet defectors and ex-communists also claimed that she was assassinated by the USSR, including Whittaker Chambers, Walter Krivitsky, Benjamin Gitlow, and Elizabeth Bentley. Her body was never found.

“I am still a woman’s suffragist or worse still a Feminist and also a Socialist (also of the worst brand).”

- Juliet Stuart Poyntz