by Liz Daube
Staff Writer
When attorney Frank Shoemaker’s grandmother gave him a beaten old notebook to use for law school, he thanked her – and almost trashed hundreds of government surveillance documents from the “Red Scare” era.
“I’m going to throw the thing away, and I pull out this memo file – and here’s all this intelligence stuff,” said Shoemaker. “He (my grandfather) was a spy, and I don’t think anybody knew about it.”
When he discovered the notebook around 1990, Shoemaker already knew that his deceased grandfather, Thomas Francis MacDowell, had worked for the government during the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. After MacDowell died, his name turned up in books about covert government activities, such as “The Invisible Government.”
Still, his family didn’t know the extent of MacDowell’s intelligence activities until Shoemaker started reading the documents in the notebook.
The miscellaneous collection of documents ranges from “Subversive activities, Zone 7” memos to newspaper clippings to detailed surveillance reports on individuals in the Birmingham area, where MacDowell lived following World War II.
Some of the reports are stamped “confidential” or “restricted,” and phrases like “FBI is cognizant” are sprinkled throughout. Shoemaker said some of the names in the documents helped him figure out that his grandfather was spying on suspected Communists.
For example, he read an online obituary for Virginia Foster Durr – and suddenly realized he knew her name from his grandfather’s reports.
“She was the lady who bailed Rosa Parks out of jail,” said Shoemaker. “It (the article) said ‘amassed a 600-page FBI file...’ And I’m like, ‘Now I know where I know her name from.’ ”
MacDowell was an attorney, like Shoemaker, but he volunteered during World War II to work as a naval intelligence officer. Shoemaker said his grandfather returned to the law after the war, but he secretly continued to do surveillance for the government.
Shoemaker noted that much of the material from the notebook could be amusing now, considering the fear of Communism common in the 1940s and ‘50s has all but disappeared from today’s America. Still, he said the documents made the history he learned in school feel a bit more real.
“It’s very foreign and it’s all actors,” Shoemaker said of the films he watched about the McCarthy era. “You don’t really care about it. Then you start reading this, and it’s reporting on your neighbor.”
Shoemaker said he was a child when his grandfather died and they never spoke about his spying days.
“I’d like to know if he was doing it because it was his job, or if he really thought those people were a threat,” said Shoemaker, wondering aloud if some of the women his grandfather followed to, say, a local bakery, were really engaged in subversive activity.
“He was code-named ‘The Little Man.’ He was about 5’6,” added Shoemaker, smiling. “But there’s nothing foolish about what he did. My grandfather was very patriotic, and this was very serious to him – and he was ordered to do it.”
Despite current controversy weighing privacy rights against the legality of some government surveillance – such as warrantless wiretapping and Internet monitoring – Shoemaker said spying doesn’t worry him.
“I don’t think people understand that it (government surveillance) has already happened. I think we were much more paranoid then (in the ‘50s),” said Shoemaker. “I (also) think there’s a lot more going on than any of us are aware of.
“The eyes have just changed,” he added. “It’s all electronic.”
Shoemaker plans to pass the notebook on to Birmingham’s public library system at some point to make sure the documents are preserved. He said he doubts his grandfather meant to leave the documents for others to uncover, but MacDowell left other secretive items behind, as well.
“After my grandfather died, my grandmother had the house painted,” said Shoemaker. “The painters called and said, ‘Did you know your grandma had this gun?’
“It was in the closet, and she didn’t know it was there,” he continued. “It had no (serial) numbers on it.”