Influenced by the utterances of the late Senator McCarthy and similar professional patriots, most Americans—especially the younger generation brought up on lurid television programs and the fanciful accounts of self-confessed Communist spies—have been conditioned to think of the Communist Party as a wickedly cunning and devilishly efficient organization disposing of an inexhaustible war chest and commanding a vast army of fanatic professionals trained to a razor-sharp edge in every trickery to ensnare the ignorant masses. That was not my experience in Canada. Before my first week was up I found myself enmeshed in problems stemming from the utter poverty and ineptness of the Communist movement. Worse still, as I discovered to my dismay, the comrades around me not only blithely assumed that, as the editor of the Worker and therefore the leader of the Hungarian movement, it was my responsibility to solve those problems, they also took it for granted that I had the training and the experience to cope with them.
The first problem I had to face was that the Worker had no funds and the print shop refused to extend credit unless we settled the old bills piled up by Lustig. I solved that by paying them out of my own pocket.
Next there was the problem of the party fractions—where they were, what they were doing, just how many Hungarian party members there actually were in Canada. It soon transpired that there were less than a dozen, not even the members of the Bureau were all members of the party. The people hanging around the Worker—usually more than a dozen, they came and went with new faces showing up all the time—called each other comrades, considered themselves Communists, but were not actually members of the party. Outside of a few men like Kovacs they had no contact with the Canadian party whatever.
I decided to change all that. Whoever came to see me from then on was asked to sign up. Most of the Hungarians in Canada then were migratory workers, riding the freight trains from one end of the provinces to another in that vast country in search of jobs—digging coal for a few months in Alberta, working on some farm in Saskatchewan, turning up afterward in New Brunswick or Nova Scotia to cut pulpwood for the paper mills. They would make the Worker their headquarters between jumps, and in a few weeks I not only made friends with a sizeable number of them but also signed them up in the party, assigned them responsibilities within the limits of their abilities such as recruiting other party members in their camps, and to support the Worker in an organized manner. From the reports they sent me it soon became clear that no matter in what remote logging camp these men happened to land, the Red Flag soon became a topic of most intense discussion.
But it wasn’t at all easy; it took immense effort that kept me on the go all the time with barely time to sleep. I needed help and advice badly and wrote to Mayer repeatedly about it; he didn’t even reply. Finally I decided to contact the Canadian party leadership and call on them for help and political guidance.
