In the end, the IRS investigators were unable to find evidence of any wrongdoing. Moreover, as the IRS team became familiar with the group’s work, they came to sympathize with it, and “when they finished, [they] made a contribution between them – every
one of them gave a few dollars,” Bergson later told historian David Wyman.
The sympathy expressed by the IRS agents contrasted sharply with the sentiments expressed in some of the FBI documents which I obtained. One FBI report about Bergson activist Maurice Rosenblatt derisively referred to the left-wing Coordinating Committee for Democratic Action, in which Rosenblatt was active, as “this Semitic Committee.” The report complained that Rosenblatt and his colleagues were trying to “smear” Nazi sympathizers in New York City.
“When there is a genuine threat, governments sometimes have to do things like eavesdrop,” Jack Yampolsky concedes. “But in our case, they were doing it for political reasons, and anti-Semitism also played a role. The fact that we vocally disagreed with U.S. government policy regarding the Holocaust and Jewish statehood was not a valid reason for the Roosevelt administration to enlist the FBI and the IRS in a war against the Bergson group.”
