Nathan Witt

Nathan Witt
Witt (center), with NLRB Chair J. Warren Madden (left) and NLRB Chief Counsel Charles Fahy in 1937
Born	(1903-02-11)February 11, 1903 New York City, New York, U.S.
Died	February 16, 1982(1982-02-16) (aged 79) Manhattan, New York City, New York, U.S.
Education	JD Harvard Law School
Alma mater	New York University
Occupation	Lawyer

Nathan Witt (February 11, 1903 – February 16, 1982), born Nathan Wittowsky, was an American lawyer who is best known as being the Secretary of the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) from 1937 to 1940. He resigned from the NLRB after his communist political beliefs were exposed and he was accused of manipulating the Board's policies to favor his own political leanings. He was also investigated several times in the late 1940s and 1950s for being a spy for the Soviet Union in the 1930s. No evidence of espionage was ever found.

Witt was born February 11, 1903, into a Jewish family on the Lower East Side of New York City. His father changed the family name to Witt shortly after his birth. His college education was interrupted several times by the need to earn a living, but he graduated in 1927 from New York University.

Angered by what he perceived as the judicial mistreatment and illegal execution of the anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti in 1927, he drove a taxi cab for two years to earn money for law school. He graduated from Harvard Law School in 1932, specializing in labor law. He attended Harvard shortly after Alger Hiss had left the school, and he was a friend of Donald Hiss, a Harvard Law classmate and Alger Hiss's younger brother.

Witt joined the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA) in July 1933. His friend, Lee Pressman, recommended him for the job. According to accusers Whittaker Chambers, Lee Pressman, and Elizabeth Bentley, Witt—along with John Abt, Charles Kramer, Alger Hiss, and Nathaniel Weyl, among others—were part of the so-called "Ware group," a clandestine Communist Party USA group formed by AAA economist Harold Ware. Chambers also alleged that Witt became leader of the group after Ware died in an automobile accident in August 1935. Pressman said the men merely met to study and discuss left-wing political theory, but Chambers described it as a Soviet-controlled cell dedicated to committing espionage. Historian David M. Kennedy, assessing a half-century's evidence about the case, concurred with Pressman's assessment in 2001.