Nathaniel Weyl

Nathaniel Weyl (July 20, 1910 – April 13, 2005) was an American economist and author who wrote on a variety of social issues. A member of the Communist Party of the United States from 1933 until 1939, after leaving the party he became a conservative and avowed anti-communist. In 1952 he played a minor role in the Alger Hiss case.

Weyl was born in New York City, the only child of Bertha Nevin (née Poole) and Walter Edward Weyl, a founder of The New Republic and a prominent progressive. His father was from a German Jewish family, and his mother, originally from Chicago, was from a Christian background.

Weyl received his Bachelor of Science Degree from Columbia College of Columbia University in 1931. There, he joined the Social Problems Club and "created the Morningside Heights branch of the SP, which covered Columbia, Barnard, and Union Theological Seminary ... soon ... the largest branch in the Party." He did postgraduate work at the London School of Economics, where instructors included Friederich Hayek on the right and Harold Laski on the left. He returned to Columbia for doctoral studies in economics in 1932 and became a leader of the "Communist-controlled" National Student Union. Edmund Stevens, like Weyl, was an editor of Student Review and convinced him to join the Communist Party.

Weyl described his position in the party in a manner that may indicate pre-positioning for underground work:

I was made a Member At Large (MAL) of the Party. This meant that I was not to express views which identified me as a Communist, not frequently to attend rallies or associate with known Communists, that I would not be a member of any unit, and would have to stay away from CP headquarters.

In 1933, he received an offer from Thomas Blaisdell to join the Agricultural Adjustment Administration as an economist. He joined the Ware group, a covert cell of Communists in Washington, DC. Some members of the Ware group engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union. Weyl described his Ware Group participation otherwise: "I was one of its less enthusiastic members." Also, he summarized its early activities (during his membership) as follows:

During the time I was a member, the secret Ware cell of the Communist Party did nothing at its meetings except engage in reverential discussion of Marxism–Leninism and of the world situation as perceived by the Comintern. ... Nothing that we were doing was secret from a national security standpoint. ... It did not occur to me that the Ware cell might be lured into the crime of espionage.

Weyl described what could be interpreted as Ware's efforts to corral him into espionage and his own effort to extract himself from the group: