Draft:Gardner Jackson

Jackson was born on September 10, 1896, in Colorado Springs, Colorado. His father, William Sharpless Jackson, was a wealthy banker, landowner, and owner of the Denver & Rio Grande Western Railroad. His mother, Helen Fiske Banfield, was a Vassar graduate and the niece of his father’s first wife, Helen Fiske Hunt, author of Ramona and Century of Dishonor who passed away in 1885.

Jackson entered Amherst College in 1914, leaving in 1917 to join the United State Army where he was assigned to a machine gun company in Georgia. After World War I he resumed his education at Columbia University where he studied journalism. Following college, Jackson returned to Colorado where he briefly joined the investment firm of Boetcher, Porter and Company in Denver before becoming a reporter at the Rocky Mountain News. In 1920 he married Dorothy Claude Sachs and moved to Boston where he joined the Boston Globe as a reporter and editorial writer.

In 1921, at the urging of his wife Dorothy, Jackson began reporting on the trial of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, two immigrant Italian anarchists accused of a payroll robbery and the murders of a guard and paymaster on April 19, 1920 in Braintree, Massachusetts.^[2]  Jackson became convinced Sacco and Vanzetti were on trial because of their political beliefs. In 1922 he took a leave from the Boston Globe to work against the dismissal of President Alexander Meiklejohn of Amherst College.  In 1926 he was recruited by Aldino Felicani, founder of the Sacco-Vanzetti Defense Committee, and the labor leader Mary Donovan to manage the committee’s publicity and mediate between the Committee’s founding anarchist members and the growing body of liberal supporters. Jackson was successful in gaining global attention to Sacco and Vanzetti’s case, and enlisted the support of the noted American author John Dos Passos, who joined the committee and wrote its 127-page review of the case: Facing the Chair: Story of Americanization of Two Foreignborn Workmen.^[3]

Jackson was so successful in managing the publicity of their case, that he was thanked by Sacco a few weeks before his execution:

“We are one heart, but unfortunately we represent two different class … But, whenever the heart of one of the upper class join with the exploited workers for the struggler of the right in the human feeling is the feel of an spontaneous attraction and brotherly love to one another.”^[2]

Jackson organized the funeral of the two men. Time Magazine reported:

"First came the three leading members of the Defense Committee - Gardner Jackson, Aldino Felicani, Mary Donovan. Each kissed the brows of the dead. An uncountable crowd, pushed and prodded into line by police, shuffled stuffily after to scowl, weep or gape. Miss Donovan was arrested when she tried to insert an anti-Judge Thayer placard among the funeral flowers... Mary Donovan and Gardner Jackson of the defense committee had the hardihood to follow into the crematorium after Miss Donovan had read a last eulogy to the dead. They peered through a glassed peephole at the coffins flaming in the vault. On the rim of the surrounding natural amphitheater, the crowd watched the wisp of smoke until nightfall."^[4]

Jackson edited, along with Marion Denman Frankfurter, wife of Supreme Court Justice Felix Frankfurter,  The Letters of Sacco and Vanzetti which were published by the Vanguard Press of New York in 1929.

In 1930 Jackson intervened on behalf of 20 scrubwomen, who had been dismissed by Harvard University in 1929. He was involved in the case of Dr. Ray Ovid Hall, who was fired from the United States Department of Commerce for refusing to delete comments from the Department’s Annual Report on “The Balance of International Payments."  Jackson was an advocate for the release of Thomas Joseph Mooney, who was convicted and sent to prison on the basis of falsified evidence and perjured testimony for allegedly participating in the San Francisco Preparedness Day Bombing of 1916.

In 1931 Jackson moved to Washington, D.C. where he was the Washington correspondent for the Toronto Star, the Montreal Star, and the Toronto Telegram.

In 1933 Jackson joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, a New Deal program created by the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) of 1933 to boost agricultural prices by reducing surpluses. Jackson worked under Frederic C. Howe of the Consumer’s Counsel along with other radicals that included Jerome Frank, Adlai Stevenson, Alger Hiss, Hope Hale Davis, and Lee Pressman. Jackson advocated for the protection and aid on non-property owning farmers such as sharecroppers and tenant farmers, conflicting with policy set by the head of the AAA, George N. Peek who claimed the organization “ was crawling with … fanatic-like … socialists and internationalists.” When Chester R. Davis replaced Peek he purged the AAA of the left-wing elements, insisting in February 1935 that Jerome Frank and Alger Hiss should be dismissed, followed soon thereafter by Howe and Jackson, in what has been called the “Wallace Purge” after then Secretary of Agriculture Henry A. Wallace.

Time Magazine reported:

“In AAA’s Information Division, Consumers’ Counsel Frederick C. Howe and Gardner Jackson slashed about them in the name of the consumer. Slow and steady Mr. Davis was not at home among such assistants, was not prepared to go their radical lengths. He held his hand, but the time came when the ax had to fall … One murky evening last week a mimeographed sheet announced a reorganization of AAA.” ^[5]

Howe told Jackson after their dismissal, “…I can say at the end of nearly two years working with you and twenty other men and women that there has been a high degree of efficiency and an equally high degree of devotedness and intellectual integrity as to which not ever a question has been asked.” ^[6]

Following his dismissal from the AAA, Jackson joined the Research Associates, a scientific research and consulting firm headed by Frederick Cottrell. During his time at Research Associates Jackson was active in the Aid Republican Spain Committee and joined the Committee for Cultural Freedom along with John Dewey, Sidney Hook, Dashiell Hammett and Harold Weisberg. He was the Washington correspondent of the now-defunct newspaper PM in the early 1940s.

Jackson returned to government service in 1941, and rejoined the Roosevelt administration as Special Assistant to Secretary of Agriculture Claude Wickard and Under Secretary Paul H. Appleby. Jackson was assigned to the Farm Security Administration, a New Deal agency created in 1937 to combat rural poverty. Jackson was fired in 1943 after “pushing too hard for expansion of the Farm Security Administration, which focused its efforts on helping the small subsistence farmer. According to Jackson’s obituary published in the Washington Post: “An element in both firings was a suspicion that the outspoken official [Jackson] had leaked inside information to the press.”^[1]

Jackson was a vocal opponent of the House Un-American Activities Committee established by U.S. Representative Martin Dies Jr. (D-Tex.) in 1938. Although a staunch leftist, Jackson was critical of the Communist Party of the United States. In 1944, outside of a restaurant in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Jackson was attacked and beaten by Jack Lawrenson, vice-president of the National Maritime Union because of an article Jackson had written about the union leader Harry Bridges. Jackson was hospitalized and lost the sight of his left eye due to the attack.^[7]

In 1946 Jackson attended the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization meeting in Copenhagen, then traveled to France to study agricultural conditions. In 1948 and 1949, he served as special assistant to Welch Grape Juice Company President, J.M. Kaplan.

In 1952 Jackson worked on the U.S. Senate campaign of John F. Kennedy.

In the 1950s Jackson was employed by Philip Murray, head of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) in a “free-lance, legislative, liaison role” and remained affiliated after the CIO’s merger with the  American Federation of Labor (AFL-CIO).  During his tenure with the AFL-CIO, Jackson was interested in Bolivian affairs.  He and James B. Carey, Secretary-Treasurer of the CIO and President of the International Union of Electrical, Radio, and Machine Workers, investigated the threat of communist-dominated unions operating in defense plants. In the 1950s Jackson was associated with the American Federation of Physically Handicapped; the National Congress of American Indians; and the Friends of Good Music. He campaigned for the passage of area redevelopment legislation and worked on Indian issues as an official representative of the CIO Committee to Abolish Discrimination.^[7]

In 1958 Jackson was dismissed from the AFL-CIO due to his vigorous campaign to improve working conditions for agricultural workers.^[7] After leaving the union he worked on a non-paid basis  on migrant labor issues with groups such as the National Farm Labor Union, the National Farm Labor Advisory Committee, and the National Sharecroppers Fund.

From 1960-1961 Jackson was a consultant on farm policy to the Chicago Board of Trade. In 1962 he was a consultant for International Development Services Inc.