In an August 2000 letter to Philip Nel, a scholar of children’s books and comics, the cartoonist Syd Hoff recounted his history with the Left. Nel was working on a book about Crockett Johnson, the cartoonist behind the Barnaby comic and Harold and the Purple Crayon. In the 1930s, Johnson had been the art editor of New Masses, a left-wing magazine to which Hoff had contributed cartoons.

But Hoff, a longtime contributor to the New Yorker and the author of the kids book Danny and the Dinosaur, had done so under a pseudonym. In his work for New Masses, he used the name A. Redfield. According to Hoff, Clarence Hathaway came up with the pen name when he brought Hoff on as a cartoonist for the publication he edited, the Daily Worker. Hathaway was a member of the Communist Party, rising in the organization alongside eventual general secretary Earl Browder, and the Daily Worker was the party’s house organ. Pseudonyms were not unheard of among contributors: with Red Scares an ever-present threat, some artists kept their ties to the Left a secret.

That distance proved wise for Hoff. The FBI did indeed call on him in the 1950s. In a statement to the bureau in 1952, Hoff downplayed the cartoons he’d drawn as A. Redfield, as well as his staff position at the Daily Worker.