Biography
Frederick Vanderbilt Field, a wealthy heir who broke with his class to become a radical, was a trustee of the Civil Rights Congress Bail Fund. When a federal grand jury demanded the names of the fund's contributors after four Smith Act Communists jumped bail, Field refused and was jailed for contempt in 1951, serving some nine months.
John Q. Barrett’s 2017 legal history distinguishes Judge Sylvester Ryan’s ninety-day criminal-contempt sentence from a separate six-month consecutive sentence imposed by Judge John F. X. McGohey after Field refused federal grand-jury questions and records demands. Barrett reports release from Ashland on February 26, 1952 after good-time credit. The consecutive imposed terms are not a measurement of actual service; brief bail proceedings and an internal two-month versus ninety-day wording difference prevent reconstructing an exact total from this account alone.
Jackson, Vinson, Reed, and “Reds,” Journal of Law 7 (2017), pages 19–32.
The Guardian reports: Field spent three days jailed before obtaining temporary $10,000 bail; this initial interval does not measure his later confinement. Contemporary account, page 6.
An Associated Press report from New York published July 18, 1951 states that federal appeals judges cancelled the temporary appeal bail of Frederick Vanderbilt Field, Dashiell Hammett and W. Alpheus Hunton the previous day. It reports all three in jail on July 18. The account distinguishes these trustees’ contempt proceedings from the eleven Communist Party defendants whose Civil Rights Congress bonds had been revoked on July 16 and who could seek release on acceptable replacement bail. Cancellation of appeal bail does not by itself establish that each trustee had previously been physically released. Source: Midland Reporter-Telegram, July 18, 1951, page 9, “Red ‘Bail Angels’ Returned To Jail For Indefinite Stay,” Associated Press.
