relief effort and the organization directing it. It maintained an office in New York and a paid staff of about 40 "organizers", members of the Workers Party of America (WPA), some of whom were engaged to travel the country speaking on behalf of the organization and engaging in politics "in their free time." In this sense, the FSR subsidized WPA activity by providing paid employment for some of its leading cadres. This structure drew the ire of the opponents of the WPA, particularly Abraham Cahan, editor of the Socialist Party-affiliated Yiddish daily The Jewish Daily Forward, which began making charges of irregularity and extravagance in the handling of funds on the part of FSR in editorials and news stories in the summer of 1922. In response to these charges, the FSR appointed an "Investigating Committee of Five", including Roger N. Baldwin of the ACLU, Norman Thomas of the League for Industrial Democracy, Robert Morss Lovett of the liberal magazine The New Republic, Timothy Healy of the Stationary Fireman's Union, and attorney Walter Nelles. While the last-mention later recused himself to avoid possible charges of conflict of interest, the other four members of the committee issued a report at the end of October 1922 essentially clearing the FSR of wrongdoing and attributing the charges against the group to "factional interests." Publications The organ of the FSR was the magazine Soviet Russia, a plain-paper magazine which had originated as the journal of the Russian Soviet Government Bureau (RSGB), headed by Ludwig Martens in New York in 1919. The Martens Bureau had first sent out 13 issues of a weekly news sheet called The Weekly Bulletin of the Bureau of Information of The Soviet Union, intended as a sort of news service for the used of other periodicals but had decided to issue its own magazine starting June 7, 1919. The RSGB stated that its new official magazine "is published in order to acquaint the people of the United States with the real conditions in russia and to combat the campaign of deliberate misrepresentation which is being waged by enemies of the Russian workers..." As the government of Soviet Russia was not recognized by the government of the United States, Martens was forced to shut down his bureau and leave the country in 1920. To some extent, Friends of Soviet Russia seems to have emerged as a publishing unit to keep this magazine