that any one of these persons in particular is a Communist. Backlash Dies was criticized for using his Committee to further his personal campaign to undermine the New Deal agenda during the late 1930s and early 1940s. For example, Michigan Governor Frank Murphy lost his re-election bid in 1938 after being labeled "a Communist or a Communist dupe" during testimony before the Committee. The Labor Department, the WPA Federal Theatre Project and Writers' Project, and the National Labor Relations Board were subjected to similar denunciations. While the Committee ostensibly investigated both suspected Communists and Fascists, Dies was concerned primarily with a supposed Communist conspiracy, as reflected in his own book, The Trojan Horse in America. In 1940, Congressman Frank Eugene Hook sought to discredit the Committee, and Dies personally, by presenting evidence linking Dies to the agitator and spiritualist William Dudley Pelley; but Dies was able to show that the documents cited by Hook were forged. Dies articulated concerns of the "racial question" as it related to minimum wage provision under the Fair Labor Standards Acts, stating, "What is prescribed for one race must be prescribed for the others, and you cannot prescribe the same wages for the black man as for the white man." Encouraged by his victory over Hook and a quadrupling of his Committee's budget, Dies' accusations became progressively more scurrilous. In March 1942, he wrote a letter to Vice President Henry Wallace claiming that 35 members of the Board of Economic Warfare, which Wallace chaired, had been members of Communist organizations. He singled out one member in particular, Maurice Parmelee, as both a Communist sympathizer and a nudist, based on Parmelee's 1926 book, The New Gymnosophy. Parmelee was indeed an advocate for gymnosophy, a form of asceticism originated by two German nudist activists, but its relevance to American national security was never convincingly explained. Dies' public charges and rumor-mongering after June 1941 came at a time when the USSR was a member of the allied nations resisting the Nazi offensive in Europe and North Africa. Rather than assisting the effort to ferret out Nazi spies during World War II, Dies continued his pre-war fixation on Communist spies in the U.S. government—a precursor to the McCarthy era during the 1950s. Later life Dies was an unsuccessful candidate for the United States Senate in a special election held in late June, 1941 to fill the seat vacated by