All Communist activities are governed by the “Party Line”; all Communists are held to the sacred rule:
“The Party Line is always right.”
Any challenge to this concept is heresy. Heretics in Communist countries—those not tortured to· death or executed outright—usually end their days in jail or forced labor camps. In capitalist countries, as for instance in America, these heretics were usually branded Trotskyists or counterrevolutionary Fascists, and denounced in the Daily Worker as paid stool pigeons of the imperialists and embezzlers of Party funds, their pictures prominently displayed in the Daily Worker under the standing head :
WORKERS’ ENEMIES EXPOSED
Yet the Party Line was an elusive guide. Besides being always right it had a number of other peculiar characteristics. Infallible as it was proclaimed to be, nevertheless it was subject to diametrical changes overnight without conceding in any way that the old line might have been wrong after all.
Another peculiarity of the Party Line was that a comrade’s ability to “interpret it correctly” had nothing to do with his intellectual accomplishments or his thorough familiarity with the writings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, but depended solely on his standing in the Party hierarchy. The higher up he stood in leadership—no matter how great his ignorance—the more “correct” his understanding of the Line automatically became.
The genesis of that party line was usually a speech made by Stalin, but sometimes it was Molotov, or some other high ranking official of the Soviet Union or the Comintern who was given the task of sounding off. The sacred text then was immediately broadcast by the Inprecor published and republished in pamphlets, artIcles, editorial, re-echoed in speeches first by Browder, then the others in the exalted Central Committee, and so on down. It was. the same speech, the same clichés “adapted to the special conditions.” Such adaptation usually consisted of an added phrase or two by the respective official and it concluded with the stern but somewhat redundant admonition:
“We must bend our utmost effort to carry out these decision in line wIth the new party line and adapt them to the special prevailing conditions.”
The “line” thus handed down from above could be freely discussed at each step and the membership was encouraged to participate in it, provided this discussion was in the affirmative and not only ended but also started with:
“I agree with the correctness of the new Party Line.”
Certain democratic variations were permitted. A party member, in fact, any party member was free to say instead :
“I laud the new Party Line.”
The ambitious and eager would usually combine both and declaim:
“I laud the new Party Line and agree with the correctness of it.”
That testimonial cinched it good.
One day the comrade in charge of the Cleveland Bookshop called to tell me of a puzzling experience. The night before a man came into the bookstore, asked for a book that would tell him what the party line was. The comrade had tried to explain to him that there was no such book but the man would not accept his explanation. The man insisted that with all the talk about the party line there had to be a book about it, how else could anybody know what it really was, and he accused the comrade of sabotage, of trying to keep people from learning about the party line. To the comrade it was clear he was dealing with a crackpot and to avoid trouble he decided to humor hIm. He proceeded to sell him a copy of every party pamphlet, every magazine in the store, some of which had long turned yellow with age, and he topped it off with the jackpot—by unloading on him a complete set of Lenin’s works, which was really dead stock as far as the average member was concerned. The purchase came to around fifty dollars, the highest single transaction and cash sale in the history of that bookshop. The comrade, although pleased with his salesmanship and greatly amused by the stupidity of that man, was worried that he might have been dealIng with a stool pigeon. .
I shared his amusement but not his worry—from the description he gave me that man looked like Hall (this is not his true name)—he certainly sounded like him. Hall was one of our new comrades, a newspaperman and one of the original founders of the Newspaper Guild. He was an ardent Guild man and a member of its National Board. He was one of those union men who first became party sympathizers because of the help they received from us when trying to form a union, and who later joined the party when they saw how effective a party cell could be in promoting the growth of a union. I checked with Hall and my guess was correct. He had just come back from a meeting of the National Board in New York where the party fraction kept rebuffing his ideas with: “You don’t know the party line, you don’t understand it.” Hall was a thorough newspaperman, one of the best in Cleveland; he determined to make up for that deficiency. Hence his visit to the bookstore.
A few weeks later Hall called—he wanted me to meet him urgently and in secret. We agreed on an out-of-the-way bar where neither of us was known and where we would be most unlikely to be discovered.
Hall came in carrying a bulging brief case. He unzipped it and said:
“Voros, I want to tip you off to something. There is graft and corruption in the party and it reaches right into the Central Committee. I have here the evidence to prove it.” With that he reached into the brief case and laid pamphlet after pamphlet on the table, all of them carefully marked as to pages with entire passages and chapters underlined in ink.
“Look at these sons of bitches,” Hall proceeded to demonstrate, pointing to pamphlet after pamphlet. “They’ve taken Molotov’s speech and plagiarized it. See for yourself, page after page of verbatim quotes from Molotov. This is Browder’s pamphlet. But then take Stachel on trade union work, James W. Ford on the Negro question, Gil Green on youth work, and the rest of them. They not only plagiarized Molotov but they also plagiarized Browder, taking entire pages over from his pamphlet. They are making suckers out of the party members, making them buy those pamphlets and rake in the shekels. I have all the proof here. Now, what do you think we ought to do to expose those racketeers and clean them out of the party?”
I was shaking with laughter and Hall got angry. He told me he had always thought me clean and sincere, he hoped I wasn’t mixed up in that racket. It took quite a time to satisfy him that there was no graft involved, that that was the way the party line was handed down to membership and “adapted to the special conditions.”
From there we went to discussing the “party line” which I explained to Hall as “the proper interpretation of communist policy, strategy, and tactics by the dialectical analysis of any given situation based on the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and also Stalin.”
“That’s no line at all,” snorted Hall. “To me that’s merely a trick to make the membership toe the mark and to enable the leadership to wriggle off the hook when its policy backfires.”
That was the trouble with new members, especially with those in the Newspaper Guild. Those “prostitutes of the venal capitalist press” as we used to call them became so corrupted in their thinking by their years of servitude to the Press Lords that even joining the Party was not enough to purify them completely.
To them nothing was sacred, not even the Party Line; they looked with cynical eyes even on the party leadershIp, But not only new members like Hall had difficulty with the Party Line. Even an old-timer like Phil Bart, former District Organizer of Ohio, a man who always fanatically insisted that the party line must be followed to the letter, admitted to me at one of our intimate parties restricted to the select few in the innermost leadership that once—even though that one time alone—-he also found himself stymied by it.
When Bart was in his twenties he had received an assignment to join the National Guard “to bore from within” and to carry on antimilitaristic agitation within Its ranks. That was years before World War II. He was frail and undernourished and had a difficult time getting himself accepted. Finally they took pity on him and permitted him to sign up in time to leave with the Guard for their annual three weeks training.
The National Guard Summer Camp was located in the mountains where the air was clear and vigorous, the scenery enchanting. That was the first time in Bart’s life that he was away in the country, out of the dirt, filth, noise, and overcrowding of the tenement district where he was born; the first chance he had to enjoy the beauty of nature. The food was rich and plentiful, an other marvel he had never experienced. Pancakes, platters heaped with creamy butter and syrup by the pitcher, sausage, ham, or bacon and eggs for breakfast; steaks, chops, poultry, pastry, salad, and vegetables for lunch and dinner, and no limitation on portions! Bart ate and ate and ate—he gained six pounds the first week.
Late Saturday night at the end of his first week Bart sneaked out to a prearranged meeting with his comrades in the far end of the camp. After the exchange of a few furtive words he was handed a package of antimilitarist leaflets for surreptitious distribution in the camp.
When Bart got back safely and undetected he withdrew to the latrine to read those leaflets. They were antimilitary all right, following faithfully the Russian precept—they called upon the guardsmen to protest the foul, maggot-ridden starvation rations on which they were forced to subsist while their officers were gorging themselves. Bart did not know whether to cry or laugh. That night they had had steak for supper, juicy tenderloin steak garnished with mushrooms, asparagus, and French fried potatoes. Bart put away two of the steaks and had a good start on a third which even he was unable to finish. Dessert was strawberry short cake with whipped cream plus all the ice cream they wanted, and those who didn’t like strawberries had two different kinds of pie to choose from.
Bart knew he couldn’t distribute those leaflets without causing a Homeric laugh in camp. Yet it was a party task—the purpose behind his assignment to join the National Guard. Finally he came to a decision. He took a shovel and buried those leaflets deep, covered by the night sky, working fast to avoid detection. He slept fitfully during that night, haunted by the guilt of having been untrue to the Party.
The following Saturday night when Bart stole out again, his comrades were eager to learn what impression those leaflets had made in camp. When Bart related what he had done with them a vehement argument ensued. He was chastised, censured, and then handed a new batch of leaflets under strict orders that he distribute them without fail. Before agreeing to that Bart now took the precaution of reading them by flashlight first. It was an appeal calling upon the guardsmen to demonstrate in protest against the arrogant brutality of their officers, and to demand the immediate abolishment of corporal punishment in the camp.
It was a good leaflet in a sense. No different from the kind Bart would have written himself had he not joined the Guard; based on the line that the National Guard was bossed by the Wall Street imperialists and that conditions in all imperialist armies were the same as had prevailed under the Czar in Russia. Now Bart found himself admitting reluctantly to his comrades that his officers in the National Guard were decent young fellows. Worse still, he was even forced to defend those imperialist hirelings, those minions of Wall Street who, when not on duty, acted just like the rest of the men, participating in the games and even in some of the bull sessions. Bart adamantly refused to distribute the leaflets.
The comrades persisted. The party’s antimilitarist line was right. There had to be something the men did not like, some grievance that could be exploited. Under relentless questioning Bart finally offered the observation that some of the fellows did seem to grumble while drilling. The comrades pounced upon that. Since there was no time to prepare another leaflet, they ordered Bart to start agitation for the abolition of the drill. To this Bart agreed.
That was the last week of camp, the end of the three-week jaunt. It was a wonderful vacation for all, particularly for Bart to whom it was a happy interval of carefree existence under the open sky, his first experience of luxuriating in opulence. But party decisions had to be carried out. By then Bart, as expected of a good Communist, had managed to build around himself a small group of men who were more or less influenced by him. Most of the men seemed eager to come back to camp next year and Bart thought that was the right cue to introduce the subject.
“You know, men,” he told them, “what we ought to do next year is ask them to cut out the drill.”
The men looked at him in puzzlement. Then one of them spoke up incredulously.
“Are you crazy? You mean you don’t like drilling?”
“If you don’t like to drill then what the hell you want to come back here for?” said another.
“What’s the sense in coming back here if they’d cut out the drill?” asked the others. Drilling was fun, that was what they liked most about the National Guard.
Bart gave up—the only time he had failed to obey a party decision or admitted the Party Line could be wrong.
In 1935, the Party Line was suddenly subjected to a startling change. Frightened by the successes of the Japanese attack on China, Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia, and the growing military might of Hitler, Stalin suddenly discovered virtues in the bourgeois democracies. Wishing to make allies of them, the Comintern now called for a United Front of all elements in every nation to oppose Fascism regardless of what ideological differences they might have with Communism. This United Front policy as announced by Dimitroff in his address to the Seventh Congress of the Communist International espoused patriotism as an antidote to Fascism, and the new Party Line now proclaimed:
“Communism is 20th Century Americanism!”
The Declaration of Independence was suddenly given a new hasty reading. Up until then it had been held in contempt, for according to the Party Line it was a hypocritical bourgeois document, a mere instrument in the hands of the rising bourgeoisie of the original thirteen colonies with which to fight the rival capitalist class of England. The party now solemnly proclaimed it a sacred document which incontestably proved that revolution was entirely in the American tradition.
The party next set out to prove that the Communists, and they alone, were the only real guardians of American traditions. The intellectuals under Communist influence sat right down to compose folk ballads, to revive and popularize folk customs, and had there been such a thing in the United States as a native garb, the wearing of it would undoubtedly have been made obligatory for all party members.
That sudden conversion to American traditions served me well when I was appointed chairman of the Ohio State Election Campaign Committee in 1935. Up until that time the party had not really been interested in American electoral procedures and it usually entered elections only pro forma by putting up a few candidates haphazardly. I now went to work to induce the party membership in Ohio to participate in the elections in earnest. The comrades were hesitant at first. Most of them had never bothered to register or seen the inside of a polling booth.
I exhorted and lectured them on the importance of elections, raised their morale by the publicity I managed to plant in the capitalist press (here my contacts with the members ?of the Newspaper paper Guild paid off), and topped it off by obtaining official credentials for Communist Party watchers and challengers something the party had never thought of doing before—and by stationing twice as many Communist electioneers outside the booths as the other parties in the districts where we had Unemployed Councils functioning. That was easy for me. I didn’t have to pay my workers, while the Republicans and Democrats did. Since the ribbons supplied to the Republican and Democratic electioneers were narrow and only lapel size, I ordered for my workers ribbons a yard long reaching from the buttonhole almost to the ankles. My ribbons were flaming red, four inches wide, with the word COMMUNIST printed in the biggest block letters I could find. They made those election polling stations look like kiosks in Moscow.
I added an extra touch. I once saw a historical print depicting an American torchlight parade and had longed to witness one in real life ever since. But torchlight parades were passé, they belonged to another historical period. Now I saw my chance to stage one, and I did.
That torchlight parade was a big success, Cleveland hadn’t seen one in ages.
When the results were all in we found that I. O. Ford, Communist candidate for governor, was officially credited with over 55,000 votes, a gain of more than one thousand percent over the highest vote ever registered by the Communist Party in Ohio. For the first time we even polled votes from that bastion of capitalism, the exclusive residential section of Bratenahl on Lake Erie. Small as was the Communist vote cast there—as I recall it, around 25—it was sufficient to cause consternation among the ultrarich. Old butlers and maids in family service for a generation were now being eyed with suspicion, and many old Union Leaguers took to sleeping with loaded pistols under their pillows. I received news of this with undisguised glee. Little did those patricians dream that those Communist votes had been cast by their own offspring, infected by the red virus on Ivy League campuses. Those snobbish butlers and maids wouldn’t touch us with a ten-foot pole.
Our vote in Ohio was second only to that in New York, where the Communist Party polled seventy-odd thousand votes, about 20,000 more than we did. But that was no comparison. In proportion to their membership they would have had to poll three quarters of a million votes to equal our showing.
Speaking of elections, we once succeeded in electing a Communist mayor in Yorktown, in the Ohio panhandle. He wasn’t much of a mayor and Yorktown wasn’t much of a town, subsisting mainly on mining. Still, he was a real mayor, the only Communist mayor ever elected in the United States. He lost out in the next election because no mayor in America could possibly have fulfilled the campaign promises he had made.
We were campaigning on a revolutionary program:
“Paid unemployed compensation, to all those out of work, of $15 a week. A minimum wage of 50 cents an hour.”
To these revolutionary demands—for that’s what they were at that time—he added two of his own:
“The abolishment of all debts and mortgages;” and the key one that really got him elected:
“No taxes on liquor—ever!”
