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!”

We, the Communists, the leaders of the American proletariat, the vanguard of the oppressed everywhere . . .”

“Led by the Communist Party, the vanguard of the American working class, the toilers of America are uniting to . . .”

While we, the self-styled vanguard, shouted ourselves hoarse on street corners to catch the ears of the casual passers-by, the Fascists who were much better financed took to the air. Father Coughlin, the “Radio Priest,” the most influential of all native would-be Fascist leaders, had an estimated audience of thirty million glued to their radio receivers on Sunday afternoons. It need be said that not all those spellbound by his oratory were aware that his social gospel was Fascist in its basic content and that his “Sixteen Points of Social Justice” so temptingly ex­pounded in his golden voice were modeled on the Nuremberg program of Hitler’s National Socialist Party in Germany.

By 1936 Father Coughlin thought the time ripe for assuming personal command over his followers and to enter the field of national politics by sponsoring a Frazer-Lemke Third Party ticket in the 1936 presidential election. To give his candidates a flying start he decided to address their national nominating con­vention in Cleveland in person, making this his first political appearance in public.

To get the “feel” of that meeting it may be of help to know that the ideals of democracy, Socialism, Communism—no mat­ter what opposite courses they may take in reality—are all based on the recognition of the fundamental humanity of man, on the striving for some sort of universal brotherhood in which all men are assured of enjoying certain inalienable rights including that of being permitted to live in peace and harmony with their fellow human beings. Democracy, Socialism, Communism share with true Christianity the concept of love thy neighbor—the early Christians actually lived in a form of primitive Communism. The cruel excesses perpetrated by the Communist rulers wherever they came to power no more negate the basic idealistic content of true Communism than the tortures of the Inquisition negate the teachings of Christ.

The motivating force of Fascism, in contrast, is that of hate. Fascism is based on the atavistic urge to kill every other being who dwells in a different cave, whose manners, customs, bodily appearance mark him as different from one’s own clan. Fascism is built on the pagan myth that through sharing some mystic quality in their blood one group of men are constituted a Master Race while the rest of mankind are nothing but subhumans to be exterminated at will, or at best, fit only to serve as slaves to their masters.

I planned to get to that meeting early to have a better chance to observe the behavior of the crowd, and I did.

Yet by the time I arrived both halls of the Public Auditorium, with a combined seating capacity of 14,000, were already packed. A private army of frozen-faced young men in semimilitary uni­forms, identical shirts, breeches, and puttees, lined the walls, the aisles, and the wings of the common stage serving both auditoriums, keeping the audience under steady scrutiny. Their bale­ful eyes were alert for trouble and they made quite a show of resting their hands ominously on the blackjacks protruding from their hip pockets.

The audience was predominantly lower middle class, somberly dressed despite the summer heat; it sat uncommunicative and unsmiling.

It was a creepy sensation—a mass of humanity 14,000 strong, larger than the entire population of many a small town, waiting a full hour before the scheduled start of the meeting in a tense silence which was rarely interrupted by even a whispered sen­tence. That was Cleveland, Ohio, U.S.A. They were Americans but their behavior was not that of a normal American audience of squirming and gaily chattering people waiting for the main event. This was an almost motionless group with jaws grimly set, upper lips partially pulled back from the gums by taut facial muscles, gripped by some mystic anticipation. Physically they were one crowd yet spiritually they were not—each of them seemed to be alone with himself, his eyes glued to the empty stage but focused inwardly. They were waiting with muscles coiled like felines before the pounce, like epileptics on the verge of a seizure.

Walking down that long aisle to the press table in front under those unblinking, suspicious eyes was like running a gauntlet. I had a sudden urge to break into a run and it took great effort to saunter down slowly, jaunty and casual, to repeat with the right amount of bored indifference “Reporter” whenever chal­lenged by those uniformed thugs, praying that I be allowed to pass without being asked for my press card which would identify me as the correspondent for the Communist Daily Worker.

All at once it came, as startling as the onrush of a sudden gust of storm—the sharp hiss of a gasp, the sucking intake of breath by thousands of open mouths.

“Father Coughlin is coming!” the whisper rose into a shout and the chamber erupted in a hoarse elemental roar. That roar was totally unlike those heard at National Party Conventions; it was not the cheer of the baseball park, nor the jeer of the picket line. That was the savage howl of the human pack, unarticulated and pulsating, a release of emotions so elemental and brutal that they had been long relegated into the unconscious by thousands of years of civilization for the self-preservation of mankind; an animal howl so primitive that no single individual when alone is capable of sounding it except in moments of stark insanity. That was the cry of humans gone berserk, an emotional explosion that needs to find an outlet in violence, or be sustained untIl total exhaustion sets in.

The entrance of a corps of drummers marching with military precision now raised the already deafening frenzy to a pitch near agony and suddenly Father CoughlIn materialized—a broad­-shouldered, muscular man moving with the bounce of an athlete under the cassock of the Roman Catholic priest; flinging away his skirt with an impatient sweep when mounting the platform. He stood there with his feet planted wide apart, a triumphant smile on his face, listening to the howl of the mob as his rightful due. His stance radiated supreme self-confidence; he was the leader surveying his frenzied troops before unleashing them; only his tightly clenched fists belied his outward calm.

I can’t recall a single sentence of what Father Coughlin saId that night and I doubt there was a single individual in that audience who could have accurately retained any part of his address. That speech was not meant to be rooted in the memory of the audience—it was intended to sear the emotions of the listeners and to sensitize them to the point where they would react with similar violence at the slightest stimulus in the future.

Father Coughlin was unlike any other speaker in my memory. He was a spellbinder like Hitler, he could carry an audience, rub their emotions raw and juggle them at will. His voice was clear tenor with an operatic ring, there was a pent-up savagery in each of his sentences which he punctuated with his arm like the downward thrust of a stiletto. Unlike Hitler, he did not threaten, cajole, or thunder that he was the Fuehrer whom they had to follow. To me he was the reincarnation of Arnold, the Abbot of Citeaux, standing before the gates of the besieged city of Béziers, replying to his followers when asked how to dis­tinguish true believers from the heretics in the heat of the assault on that town:

“Kill them all; God will know his own!” As he spoke on I heard Abbot Arnold reporting back to Pope Gregory the Great with pride in his accomplishment.

“Nearly twenty thousand human beings perished by the sword. And after the massacre of the heretics the town was plundered and burnt, and the revenge of God seemed to rage over it in a wonderful manner.”

Who were the heretics in America in the thirties thus to be put to be put to the sword?

For answer let me quote from another would-be Fascist leader who is still around, the Reverend Gerald L. K. Smith, who at the time I met him was an itinerant preacher and part-time evangelist talking folksy and preaching politics under the guise of religion. He was the convivial sort, walking around with a small, black­ leather-bound Bible protruding from his hip pocket. That was not a preaching Bible but merely an oratorical device. Every time he wanted to make a point, he would pull that Bible out of his pocket, hold it high in his left hand, then give it a hard punch with his right fist. That Bible must have had a special acoustic binding for it responded with a resounding “C sharp” crack.

I talked with Smith twice. He was proud of his start with the Louisiana Kingfish, that incipient Fascist Huey Long; he did not hide from me that he was out for fame, power, and the easy fast buck. He did not relish being seen in public conversing with the correspondent of the Communist Daily Worker and was somewhat guarded with me, but not so with Gerold Frank, then a reporter on the Cleveland News, and I am now quoting from the interview Frank had with him:

“I am a reactionary.

“Reaction will produce a ruthless, intolerant, dynamic national­istic movement which will capture the imagination of the Amer­ icanpeople. I shall lead that movement. . . .

“I shall attack, and ruthlessly attack a Jew, or an Italian, or a Negro, or any other man because he is a Communist. And he doesn’t have to be a member of the Communist Party to be a Communist. If he’s imbued with Communistic philosophy he’s a Communist. They’re all one to me.

“I shall not attack any minorities because they are minorities. Some of my best friends are Jews. But I shall attack with all my strength any minority if it’s Communistic.

“I shall call for a fusion movement of all patriotic organizations in the country to wipe out with intolerant zeal the last vestiges of Communism and other atheistic destruction. Here and now I announce myself the leader of that movement, a cold blooded, intolerant, frontal attack on the subtle machination of the Communists.”

We, the Communists, thus served as a target to divert the rebellious mood of the masses from those responsible for their economic plight. In consequence millions of Americans were living under the dread of an impending Communist revolution. In all America there was but one group absolutely convinced of the impossibility of a Communist revolution in America—the members of the Communist Party.

I had not met a single responsible member of the Party—and I probed hundreds of them—who sincerely believed that we could have Communism in the United States in our lifetime­—our grandchildren, maybe yes, if they were going to be lucky.

There was a good reason for our lack of faith in revolution. While our enemies were frightened by the demonstrated vulner­ability and weaknesses of their own existing capitalist system we knew full well how inherently strong that system was—we had batted our heads against it innumerable times and had little but bloody bumps to show for it.

While those on the outside were quaking in contemplation of our imagined strength, we were fully aware of our weaknesses, the gravest of which was our inability to grow.

When I arrived in Ohio in the spring of 1931, the total Party membership in the Ohio Party District numbered about 2,200. Six years later when I left to join the International Brigades in Spain the maximum membership we were able to register still fell short of 2,900—a total net growth of less than seven hundred in six years, despite all the frantic work we did among the un­employed, with all the heartbreaking work we did to help or­ganize the unorganized in the mass production industries of steel, rubber, etc., in Ohio.

Not that we had failed to gain new recruits. I had not both­ered to keep accurate count, nor is this said in any sense of boast­ing, but I can safely record that the number of people I alone had personally recruited into the party both here and in Canada must run well into the hundreds. I am equally safe in asserting that most of those recruits quit the Party shortly after they joined.

The unemployed would march with us: “On to City Hall!” The employed would learn from us how to organize, go out on strike, and set up picket lines to safeguard their rights—and then turn their backs on us afterward because of our party line. All that talk about imperialism, about defending the Soviet Union, was no skin off their noses. What they were interested in was improving their conditions right here and now. If they wanted to hear about Kingdom Come they went to church and not to some Red yapping about a Communist paradise.

“Revolution ? You bet; that’s what many of them foreign countries need, like we had ours in 1776. You’re right about Washington; that sure is a mess that needs cleaning out bad. There is a bunch of no good bastards there who ought to be kicked out on their ass; but people are learning to vote for the man who is their friend and that’s a fact. Just watch the next election!”

These were the proletarians who made up the American work­ ing class—although most of them would have resented being called any such thing, considering themselves a “better class of people.” They were American citizens; yet the party was at­ tempting to force them into a straitjacket cut for a Russian muzhik.

That straitjacket was THE PARTY LINE.

Shortly after my return from Canada the Uj Elore moved to Ohio and I with it. The six years I spent there as a full-time party functionary in various capacities, including that of heading the Ohio Bureau of the Daily Worker, the official organ of the party, were years of the greatest social unrest in the history of the United States since the early days of the American Revolution. There was a widely felt popular recognition of the need for a drastic change in government which was manifested most dearly in the rapid radicalization of the intellectuals—the opinion molders of society. A substantial number of writers, artists, teachers, musicians, performing artists, and even preachers not only joined the chorus of discontent but even led it by their voices. For famine stalked the land, not because of flood, drought, or other ravages of the elements, a famine caused by a failure not of crops but of men in high places in government, in legislature, in banking, and industry.

The fields of the small farmer lay prostrate.

“All the peaches you can pick, 25 cents. Bring your own baskets,” read the home-scrawled signs in orchard after orchard in the fertile fields of Ohio. One farmer once proved to me with both bills and vouchers that after having sent two truckloads of peaches to market the check he received from his commission produce-broker was twelve dollars less than he had to spend for baskets alone.

Desperate as the situation of the farmer was, pressed as he was by debts, he was still better off, at least temporarily, than his his urban brother. He could raise at least part of his food and barter for the rest. He couldn’t be evicted overnight for nonpayment of rent; at least until foreclosure, which usually takes time, he was sure of a roof over his head.

The real pariah was the unemployed and there were more than 15 million of him in the land. Daily he had to face the anguished tears of his wife who was struggling to put some kind of a meal together out of scraps for her hungry children. He with his family had to go about with toes sticking out of disintegrating shoes, in tatters that would no longer hold a patch.

But this was not all. He was also turned into a moral leper. In newsprint, in pronouncements from high places, and in conversation he was constantly reproached and damned in tones that only the well-fed self-righteous can command. He was told that he, and he alone, was responsible for his sorry state. He was accused of lacking the habit of industry; that he was a wastrel; that he was deficient in those qualities of thrift and sobriety that elevate the worthy in the eyes of God and make him the rightful recipient of His bountiful blessings. After all is said and done, one has to face up to reality. Not all men are created equal, some are created weaklings. Some men are born with the crazy idea that the world owes them a living. These men are no good, they are too lazy to labor because one truth is self-evident in this here country: “Nobody needs to starve, anybody who wants to work can always get a job.”

The unemployed worker himself soon began to feel a sense of guilt about being out of a job. He developed a feeling of inferiority; he became mentally unstable, alternating between fits of rage and dumb submission, between outbursts of rebelliousness and hopeless lethargy. Those experiences, which some fifteen years later were given the collective label “the scars of the depression,” were to leave indelible marks on an entire generation.

Those who still had a job lived in constant dread of the day when they too might end up on the scrap heap of the unemployed.

Unorganized and thus unable to put up collective resistance, the employed worker fell easy victim to the iron law of unregulated capitalism which, as defined by Marx, was forever driving to extract from him the maximum production while attempting to reduce his share in the products of his labor to the minimum. He was speeded up relentlessly and, far from being given a share in his increased productivity, he was subjected to periodic cuts in his wages. He now lived under the whip:

“If you won’t do it, there are plenty men outside who will, and for less money, too!”

The self-employed-the small storekeepers, the white collar men, the professionals, the lower middle class—all feared for their survival. Empty stores lined the business streets; their show windows gaped dark at night like missing teeth in the shriveled gums of shabby old men. Lawyers, real estate men, insurance agents, accountants paced up and down fretfully in their deserted offices. Only the collection agencies hummed wIth increased activity. Engineers, chemists, technicians had to watch their skills rust away from nonuse. It takes many long years to train a physician—there were eight of them on Home Relief at one time in the city of Cleveland alone, I was told in confidence by a disheartened social worker.

However, not all was shade for everyone.

Maid for general housework,
experienced cook. White. Must
be neat, and good with children.
Sleep in. Every other Sunday
afternoon off. $15 a month.
Good references required!

read the “Help Wanted, Female” ads in the daily papers. There were less jobs than takers.

Colleges of the highest academic standing graduated their yearly quota only to add them to the swelling army of the idle. Countless young men and women, holders of coveted academic degrees had to go back home after graduation and live off their parents. I had met many of these, some of them couldn’t even pay for a cup of coffee; bright, educated, ambitious young persons in their mid-twenties who had not been given the chance to know what it felt like to have a dollar bill in their pocket which was neither begged nor borrowed, but earned by their own talent. A father of one such young man, a mixer in a chemical plant whose wages had been cut to $30 a week, once complained to me about the unreasonableness of the young generation. His son, a graduate of Western Reserve out of college for two years but still without a job, insisted on going steady with a girl. He kept pressing his father for a quarter spending money every time he took his girl out, as often as three and even four times a week. His girl, incidentally, was a qualified high school teacher who also never had a chance of finding employment.

Young daughters, mainly from foreign born families in which there were usually too many younger brothers and sisters to feed and who discovered they still had one commodity to market, took to hanging around lunchrooms and cafeterias. Their demand was modest and geared to the times—it was a meal, whether breakfast, lunch, or dinner.

“I don’t eat much,” most of them would add with serious entreaty. Capitalism seemed to be coming apart at the seams, all according to the book. The objective preconditions of a coming revolution, as outlined by Lenin, were beginning to ripen right here in America.

1. There was a widespread feeling of contempt for the ruling classes in and out of government. The bankers, the “Captains of Industry,” and not only those in Wall Street, became objects of scorn and hatred throughout the land. President Hoover’s name was mud. A man in St. Louis or maybe it was New Orleans—I do not remember which, I recall reading it in the Miscellany column in Time—had been arrested for committing assault and battery in a movie house on a man sitting peacefully a few rows ahead of him. The accused had suddenly left his seat, walked over to that other man, who was a stranger to him, and punched him repeatedly in the nose. When asked in court what his motive was for this unprovoked assault, his only defense was: “He looked like Hoover!”

2. There was a breakdown of the capitalist system of production, choked in its own surpluses. The most efficient mass-production system in the world, equipped with the most up-to-date machinery, was grinding to a standstill. Fully one third of the greatest army of technically skilled workers the world could boast was reduced to spending its days in enforced idleness. Men highly skilled in weaving textiles, garment workers expert in tailoring clothes, were walking around in tatters; carpenters, masons, building trade workers were huddling in run-down hovels.

3. There was the demoralization of the ruling class, an abdication of their responsibilities. The White House conference called by Hoover in February 1932 of the nation’s most outstanding capitalists, the leaders in business, industry, and finance, revealed their bankruptcy in ideas. Not one of them professed to understand what caused the economic crisis, not a man among them stated it was their responsibility to come up with a constructive remedy. The most they would hazard was hope and prayer. To quote W. W. Atterbury, President of the Pennsylvania Railroad:

“The depression is bound to hit a bottom sooner or later and then things would be slowly building up.” That was his contribution—the only one of even dubious cheer at that conference.

4. Law enforcement was breaking down. Plants and mills were laying in firearms, tear gas, and machine guns, recruiting their own private armies of hired thugs to stave off the anticipated debacle. Agencies like Berghoff’s who dealt in supplying professional strikebreakers and agents provocateur did not share in the general business decline, they were thriving and expanding.

Hunger riots, spontaneous flare-ups of violence challenged the authorities of every state.

Near Bowling Green, Ohio, at a Sheriff’s Sale to satisfy a foreclosed mortgage on the land and chattels of a farmer with small children the farmers themselves came into the act, carrying fire arms. When the Sheriff, the auctioneer, the agent of the mortgage holder, an Eastern insurance company, arrived on the scene they found themselves confronted with a thick noose of shiny rope hanging from a stout limb of the oak tree beneath which were arrayed the Harvester tractor, the battered family Ford, and the rest of the farm implements scheduled to go under the hammer.

When the Sheriff wanted to postpone the sale he was informed by the men who called him by first name that they had dropped their work to attend this auction and they felt sure he wouldn’t want to inconvenience them. The frightened agent who looked deathly pale was assured in friendly tones that they had nothing against strangers who knew enough to keep their mouths shut and not to butt their noses into other folks’ affairs.

The auction went on as scheduled—no item up for sale brought more than one single bid. The farm, barn, outbuildings were knocked down for $10, the tractor brought $1.40, the car even less, a team of fine horses went for 22 cents. The total came to a little under twenty dollars, all paid in cash and in full by the neighbors, then presented free and clear to the original owner.

Home owners, the traditional upholders of the private owner ship system, the embodiment of conservatism, turned out in howling mobs in Cleveland (also in other cities) battling the combined forces of police and firemen to prevent the dispossession of other home owners on whom the banks had foreclosed, until they succeeded in bringing that banking practice to a halt. Most of them were churchgoers and deeply religious, yet they were denounced as Communists which they were definitely not—at least not until the Communists organized them into a Small Home and Land Owners Federation, when many of them did join up.

In Barberton, Ohio, a spontaneous mass strike in a match company flared into armed violence when under a police escort a group of strikebreakers were brought into the plant. I still have in my possession that “Proclamation of Riot” which I rescued after it was torn down contemptuously and trampled in the mud, ordering the strikers to disperse, an order the police were unable to enforce.

In nearby Kent, a few weeks later, when the workers refused to accept another wage cut, the management locked them out and brought in a force of armed professional strikebreakers to intimidate the workers and force them to submit. The sight of those armed thugs sauntering provokingly up and down be hind the steel-link fence surrounding the plant produced an effect totally different from that planned by the management. Many of those locked out workers happened to be mountaineers from Kentucky. They rushed home for their long-barreled squirrel guns and laid armed siege to the plant.

By the time I reached the scene the strikebreakers had all been driven inside one wing. I squatted down next to one of the mountaineers and watched him draw a bead on the water tower in the yard. The bullet hit near the bottom but drew no squirt of water from that riddled reservoir. He grunted with satisfaction and told me he only wanted to make sure, those yellow bellied skunks must be pretty parched by now, they must be asweating aplenty. He filled his pipe, then took a shot at a win dow from which someone had just fired a gun.

“They are whupped!” he apprised me of the situation, reckon ing that the ammunition of the strikebreakers must be nearly spent; they had been so “scairt” when they found themselves besieged that they shot most of their ammunition away at the start. He proved right, for in less than a half hour a white towel was hoisted from the window. The sheriff and his deputies, who had been disarmed at gun point when attempting to aid the strikebreakers, were now ordered to go fetch the men and escort them out of town. The professional strikebreakers came out thoroughly subdued, some of them wearing makeshift blood soaked bandages; they followed the sheriff with dragging feet. My companion, a bony man with a stubble beard, spat, but it might have been the tobacco. In talking with those workers one singular fact struck me. Not one of them was conscious of having committed a rebellious offense by launching a concerted armed assault against governmental authority as represented by the sheriff.

In Toledo, striking Auto Lite workers, women mostly, rushed the strikebreakers, ripped off their clothes leaving only their ties on, then paraded them stark naked down the street in broad daylight, hooting in derision.

That was the mood, the temper, the spirit of the people as I witnessed it in that great state of Ohio, the “Buckeye State,” endowed by bountiful nature with fertile valleys and rich mineral deposits; a state boasting of industrial plants and mills among the most modern in the world, and populated by six million industrious, God-fearing citizens.

The conditions prevailing in Ohio reflected the situation throughout the country. Even the dullest sensed that a change had to come. History ceased to be a recital of events long past; it became the living present pulsating with dynamic energy.

People suddenly became aware that the making of history need not necessarily be left to Washington alone. They learned that history can also be shaped by the unemployed on the streets; by strikers on the picket lines; by street brawls and organized assaults on defenseless minorities; by crude but determined men in shabby union halls organizing the unorganized; by intellectuals beating the drums.

The battle lines were shaping up; Red and Black on the two extreme wings, the undecided and the cautious in the middle—the New Deal a bit left of center trying its best to establish a new equilibrim, to restore and preserve the dream that was America.

The land was split into those who hoped for a revolutionary change and those who feared it. There were few indeed who dared maintain with genuinely felt assurance:

“It can’t happen here!”

When I returned from Canada after an absence of nearly nine months, early in September 1930, I found a vast change. I had expected a change—I had kept in touch with events at home by reading both party and nonparty American newspapers, magazines, other publications. Visual contact now reinforced the mental image I had formed in Canada and charged it with emotional content—we, the party, were being proved right! Capitalism was on the downgrade and was sliding rapidly into an abyss.

The appearance of the City of New York seemed to have altered. Not only the city had changed but also the eyes with which I was viewing it. My experiences in Canada had made me more perceptive; my eyes had learned to pick out highlights; my mind had become trained in the “political approach”—to consider most manifestations of life from the point of view of the “class struggle.”

Physically New York looked shabby, dirtier, run-down. The former infectious gayety, the determined rush, the purposeful hurry was missing from the stride of the pedestrians—the spirit of the people seemed to be running down.

I still detected the pushing and the shoving, the rudeness of manners, that stone-cold indifference and self-centered concentration of the New Yorker which seems to say, “I’ll have to look out for myself, no one else will.” Yet there was an evidence of mellowing manifested in the warmer sympathy afforded to the unemployed apple sellers, to the long lines of dispossesed queuing up in front of the many soup kitchens. The eyes of the passers-by had lost their former self-assured look—they reflected the same uncertainty, the self-doubt—the haunting feel of insecurity I had come to recognize so well in Canada.

When I left New York, the visible trouble had been mainly at the top. The big capitalists, the big exploiters were then the ones who had been reeling under the shock of the Stock Exchange crash. They were the ones who were losing their shirts, jumping out of office windows, putting guns to their temples, taking an overdose of sleeping pills. The causes and consequences of that stock market crash were now affecting the masses. Mills, mines, factories were shutting down one after another and bleak unemployment was spreading its paralyzing grip deep and wide all over the land.

The party had shrilly predicted the coming collapse months before the market crash. Now as our dogma began to prove itself we were convinced that we were the true prophets chosen to carry the sword of Red Islam, even though our muscles were thin and our ranks were sparse. We felt it was our destiny to face up to a task imposed on us by history, and if we were found lacking we would fail history.

The battle for the streets of New York was on. The police were brutal and savage. The official policy was, “Suppress the symptoms of distress; choke the cry for relief back into the throats of the hungry; banish the bastards from the streets; prevent the starving from exhibiting their sores in public—and this crisis will pass, we hope it will pass, Christ, it’s gotta pass, we gotta show those bums who is the boss!”

In retrospect, at this writing when our national income is running at more than 500 billion annually, when we enjoy a standard of living unprecedented in history and any criticism of the free enterprise system is considered subversive, it seems ironic to record in how cowardly a fashion capitalism behaved less than three decades ago, how little faith the capitalists themselves had in the survival of their own system, in the validity of their own thinking. Instead of asserting faith and leadership, they squirmed, twisted and turned; instead of thinking and planning they struck out blindly. Unable to fathom the mysteries of their own economic system, the capitalists resorted to incantation and black magic; they invoked suppression, praying that the lid would stay clamped down.

The seat of the tumor was in the United States and the malignant growth was spreading all over the globe—except for one sixth of the earth.

The eyes of the world—except for those whose gaze was fixed on the rising star in the East—were fastened on the United States where the High Priests of Capitalism reigned. The world turned to them in supplication but the eyes of those High Priests were glazed.

The High Priests were basically little men. They had not been trained to think in terms of human society. They had been encouraged to grab; to stake out claims; to gather in and to hoard; to ride roughshod over everyone who stood in their way to the glimmering harvest. They had been brought up in a one-way street ruled by “heads I win and tails you lose.” Now they found the one-way road had become a dead-end street where the once reliable coin wouldn’t perform and even the “heads” lost, and they sat down in confusion.

The High Priests had their Supreme Priest presiding over the nation, the symbol of human genius at its apex, begotten out of the political wedlock of engineering and big business. But they knew his feet were also made of clay and heeded not his admonitions.

The Supreme Priest invoked the old magic chant.

“Prosperity is right around the corner!” he intoned.

Prosperity failed to respond to blandishments. It regressed further.

The Supreme Priest called a conclave in Washington.

The High Priests all responded and officiated in the rituals of exorcising the Devil. They solemnly pledged to cease being frightened, to stop further layoffs, to start rehiring, and to resume normal production. No sooner had they left the White House than the High Priests rushed to their long-distance phones and called their plant managers. As long as the other fellow was hiring that was a good time to sneak in a rabbit punch, to take a bit of advantage. The workers lining up in front of the hiring gates with the folded newspapers in their hip pockets headlining the happy news were met by a flood of men streaming back, those who had been freshly fired that morning.

The Supreme Priest preached the return to the good life, to thrift and austerity.

To set the example he cut the government budget. The haves responded promptly by grimly clutching their belongings and by hoarding even tighter.

“Waste not, want not,” they chanted, and cut back their buying, sending production into a further tailspin.

The have-nots clenched their empty palms into fists, yet stood by in dazed helplessness.

The Supreme Priest invoked moral suasion.

“The American people are too proud to accept the dole,” he proclaimed from the depth of his Quaker soul.

“Those bums are starving because they are lazy. They don’t want to work. Anybody who wants to work can find a job,” recited the righteous haves, turning a stone heart to charity as being a violation of moral precepts. For has it not been written that the wastrels are committing an offense against God?

With sermons on their lips and clubs in their hands, the High Priests of capitalism staggered around, preaching they did not know what, laying about in blind fury, in the faint hope that if they succeeded in stifling the screams the epidemic itself would pass. Yet their very own lips trembled, the hands that gripped the clubs shook with palsy. They feared those forces around them which they had once proudly claimed to have mastered. Their ships unaccountably foundered, the Captains of Destiny now found themselves bouncing about in fragile walnut shells. They were no longer steaming toward a goal, but merely bailing in blind desperation, praying for survival.

It is appalling to contemplate how quickly these High Priests of Capitalism, these Captains of Industry, began to doubt the basic soundness of their own productive system, how little they understood the economic laws that govern production and distribution, and determine the prosperity of a highly industrialized capitalist society.

To me the most outstanding fact, the most amazing social phenomenon in that dark early era of depression is that deep in their hearts the capitalist leaders themselves had lost faith in their own system. They found themselves on a toboggan and could picture themselves only as going down. They lacked the imagination to find new ways of getting off the slide and they gave up hope of coming up. They concentrated their energies on digging in their heels to slow down their rapid descent.

Single out one capitalist leader, one important captain of industry, cite one outstanding capitalist economist, if you can, who dared proclaim:

“These are not symptoms of decay, these are growing pains of the capitalist system. Once we overcome them it will be capitalism that will usher in the era of plenty. Capitalism can and will build a land of plenty for our people in our country long before Socialism can rise to that in the East.”

Capitalism had apologists, defenders, upholders, whip-wielders, palm readers, soothsayers, and fortunetellers aplenty. Yet in those days of the depression it was unable to produce one single proponent with faith sufficient to stand up in the market place and prophesy:

“Within twenty-five years in these very same United States employment will rise to more than 6o million; nearly two in every three families will own their own homes; our people will be better fed, better clothed, better sheltered than any nation in history—all under a capitalist system!”

The faith of the capitalists was shaken.

The faith of the middle classes, merchants, professionals was shaken.

The faith of the workers and farmers was shaken.

Our faith alone was strengthened. There was no unemployment in the Soviet Union!

The men of good will, the humanitarians and the kind in heart, the sentimentalists brought forth their healing salves. “Man is good in heart,” they prayed. “We’ll have to reach the hearts of the employers with kindness.”

“Give a job,” pleaded, urged, cajoled Heywood Broun from the depth of his heart in his newspaper column and over the radio. He received four offers of jobs and 400 applicants stood in line for them.

Men of charity set up bread lines and soup kitchens. “How long have you been waiting in this line, Bud?” I asked one of the men in front of Bernarr Macfadden’s soup kitchen.

“I got here a little after five in the morning,” the man told me. He expected to get his soup “pretty soon,” in about two or three hours. That was at 2:30 in the afternoon.

Nutrition experts gave advice and the papers printed it. There was nutrition in grass, they proved, that could sustain human life if cooked long enough, say six to eight hours, and eaten in sufficiently large quantities, say six to eight pounds. There was still the matter of the bitter taste, but one can’t have everything. They did not say how to reopen shut-off gas meters. We Communists had to teach the unemployed that trick.

Other nutrition experts were more realistic. They offered menus for the less destitute. A given minimum quantity of barley and oats mixed with some kind of cheap seed germ, they promised, would provide a nutritionally balanced diet for a person for only one and three quarter cents a day, or seven cents for a family of four. This discovery, too, was hailed in some papers.

The only people in America who had professed to understand the true causes of the Depression were the Marxists. It was all down there in black and white, in the first volume of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, also in the red-inked pages of the Communist Manifesto.

The Socialists of Norman Thomas, the Musteites, the Socialist Labor Party, the IWW, all loudly asserted that the depression was the long-predicted breakdown of the capitalist production system which only social reforms could remedy.

But we were not only Marxists, we were Marxist-Leninists. We were certain that we knew even better. At the 6th Congress of the Communist International in 1928, fully one year before the stock market crash, at the height of the boom, Bukharin had warned that we were entering a new period in post First World War capitalist development.

“The Third Period—A period of capitalist crisis, of wars and revolutions,” the thesis had asserted.

We Communists far outdistanced in boldness the other Marxists whom we denounced as “social-fascists.” We had the brassier lungs, the brasher manner, we had our party discipline, and the fanaticism of martyrdom. We also had something else—we had a star of our own to guide us—the five-pointed Red Star rising with ever-brighter flame in the firmament in the East, while the tired constellation of capitalism was sinking in the West.

We were certain that we alone knew the score and we yelled it from the roof tops at the top of our lungs.

“This is no cyclical depression that reforms can cure.”

“Capitalism is in crisis! Times are bound to get much worse!”

The lines outside the factory gates were growing larger by the day. “No help wanted” signs blossomed all over the land, nailed down permanently over the windows of employment offices. The men waiting helplessly outside the gates cast envious glances at the men employed within. The men working inside the plants stole baleful and apprehensive glances at the long line of job applicants outside-the capitalist’s dream of the ideal setup for wage cuts.

“Capitalism will utilize the crisis to cut wages—to speed you up!” we trumpeted.

We were vociferously bearish in a declining economy, and we guessed right. Every calamity we predicted quickly came true with a vengeance, and brought in its wake greater human suffering than even we had anticipated.

We exulted in our wisdom! Leninism, dialectical materialism provided us with the key to the secret of the future. We prophesied even more dire events, and capitalism co-operated with us. The more frantically capitalism tried to stop the decline, the more blunders it committed. Instead of expanding the economy, it kept cutting back, bringing more unemployment as a result.

Capitalism was thinking in reverse, it wanted to fit production to declining consumption to eliminate “surplus.” As a consequence, the more people were laid off the less they were able to buy. That brought further layoffs which curtailed consumption still more—and the circle thus widened; the more people lost their jobs, the greater the surpluses grew. The national income was shrinking by the day—now was the time for the government to act.

The government did act. President Herbert H. Hoover, the production wizard and economic genius—for had he not by his own efforts in his youth amassed a fortune running into millions—was a hardheaded realist who wouldn’t let his Quaker heart enter the calculations of his brains. He pecked away at his adding machine trying to get the ledger to balance. As an engineer he knew that the machinery was jammed yet he bore down harder on the keys in the blind hope that somehow the machinery would right itself and come up automatically with the right answer.

“The budget has to be balanced!” he stated the new formula.

Consequently the currency was even more deflated, making money still tighter to borrow, thus further inhibiting production. Government revenues were shrinking so he fired more government employees, heaping more humans on the castoff pile.

We knew what the remedy was. We shouted for reforms, for government relief, for social insurance.

“Tax the rich to feed the poor!”

We roused the people, we drummed it into their heads:

“Don’t starve in silence! Raise your mighty voice! Cry out until your distress is heard, until no ear can be plugged against it in whatever high places!”

We issued leaflets and we distributed them—a handful of us, 3,000 party members in the United States in 1930 out of a population of some 130 million souls.

We worked day and night. We were inept; we were rent by factions. Many of us hardly knew English and those of us who did spoke a strange jargon half of which we ourselves did not comprehend. Our voices were shrill, we spoke with accents guttural and harsh to which American ears had not heretofore been attuned.

We were full of compassion for the sufferings of mankind, we lived in hopes of a better world to come. We were dedicated men, ready to sacrifice ourselves to bring about that better world for all mankind. The masses needed help. They were ready to act if someone would only lead them, if someone would only show them how.

We were eager for that mission! We had initiative—and we had guts. We were ready to learn from the people and also to teach them a trick or two.

A party of 3,000 members of whom not even half were active boldly issued calls for mass demonstrations. Millions responded.

We spoke at street corners and crossroads, in squares and county seats, in towns and villages where we had never set foot before. We talked and the inhabitants listened to that strange talk, the like of which had not been heard even during the presidency of Andrew Jackson, part of which they didn’t even understand, much less agree with. But they approved the parts they wanted to hear, the parts they understood because they had already spoken them silently in their hearts and which we now made vocal for them.

“What kind of a father are you? Will you let your hungry children cry because you are too proud to accept the dole?”

“Are we too proud to accept the dole? No! No! A thousand times no!” we thundered raising our fists.

Tens of thousands of other fists rose in unison with ours, hundreds of thousands of other throats shouted with us in defiance.

We not only spoke, we also organized. A young comrade hitchhiked to Allentown, Pennsylvania with five cents in his pocket, to a town where he did not know a soul. He had arrived at the square at two in the afternoon, he told me, sat down on a bench, and started to ask the others sitting there where he could get a job in Allentown.

“You can’t get a job in this town,” he was told bitterly. “They are not hiring anybody. The mills are still laying off.”

By four o’clock he was standing on a park bench making a speech, by five he was chased by the police. By six he had been invited for dinner and had a place to sleep. By seven men were coming to the home of his host for a meeting. By nine that evening the first Unemployed Council in the history of Allentown was formed.

A group of mountaineers in the Ozarks lifted their hunting rifles off the hook and walked down the hill to the country store. “We don’t aim to do you any harm,” they said to the storekeeper, as reported in the papers, “all we aim is to take some supplies for we are out of groceries and ain’t got the money to pay for it.” They loaded up with flour, sugar, tobacco, fatback, lard, and cornmeal but did not touch the cash in the till. They were not robbers, only men out of jobs, and they were getting hungry.

We sent Comrade Emil Gardos (the last I heard he was one of the heads of the State Chemical Trust in Hungary) to track them down and to recruit them into the party. Gardos succeeded in making contact with them, he told me, and they averred, reckoned, and were mighty proud—neither of us had any ear for dialect—to join such a fine organization as that “Communistical Party” they had heard about. They joined up, about seventeen of them, and then sheepishly said that the Hoskins brothers had a powerful hankering to join, too, but they didn’t see how they could be admitted to that “Communistical Party” seeing as the brothers just didn’t have any rifles.

“They were a wonderful group to work with,” said Gardos with wistful eyes, “but we finally had to drop them. They insisted on bringing their rifles to the party meetings and we couldn’t have that. It could have brought disaster on the entire party.”

We agitated. We propagandized. We exploited every opportunity to organize.

The Schrafft restaurant chain in New York advertised for busboys—several of them: “Ten dollars a week, college graduates only.” Two hundred some odd young college men had been hopefully milling around for hours since dawn by the time the personnel manager arrived. He surveyed that horde of applicants then superciliously called out:

“Graduates of Harvard and Yale, step forward.”

In less than a minute that place was a shambles, the besieged manager frantically calling for police from behind his barricaded door. Not a single one of those young college men had until then been a member of the Communist Party, but subsequently quite a number of them joined.

Violence? What would you have done if all you had was a diploma from Princeton, Columbia—or horrors! from the City College of New York?

We organized Unemployed Councils. We organized delegations to call on councilmen, congressmen, mayors, other officials, even in the privacy of their own homes.

At one unit meeting I attended in Cleveland, a comparatively new member of the party, Comrade Lombardi, was listening with ever-diminishing patience to a discussion of whether the unit should lead the proposed unemployed delegation to a certain councilman’s home or his office. A desperate relief situation was developing in that district and that councilman was hostile to the demands of the unemployed, dodging their delegations. Comparative merits of either step were discussed at length until finally Comrade Lombardi lost his temper. He banged on the table.

“We go to da house. If he not home we go to da office. We breaka da window, breaka da furniture, breaka da desk and set ‘em on afire! Next point on da agend’ is da Daily Worka. Comrades, da Daily Worka is in a very bad condidution. . . .”

I lectured that unit, especially Comrade Lombardi, that the party neither approved of such tactics nor condoned them. Comrade Lombardi was amiable.

“O.K., we no breaka da window, no smasha da furniture, no set ‘em on afire. We only tear up da papers.”

We unofficially compromised on tearing up only a few papers, and those only when nothing else availed. As it turned out, even that wasn’t necessary. The unemployed crowded into that office until there wasn’t an inch of space left, until that councilman was pushed against a corner, nose to nose with Comrade Lombardi. Lombardi talked and the councilman agreed. From then on he also became a co-operative councilman.

Violence? Maybe. But those unemployed had the right to be heard, to address their grievances to their elected representatives.

When thousands of families had their gas meters shut off and their electricity disconnected we organized emergency flying squads of experts to connect up gas pipes, restore the cut-off current.

Violation of private property rights? Maybe. Have you ever seen a mother with four hungry young children sobbing in the kitchen slumped over a dead gas range, unable to heat even water? I have. And we did something about it. We would also pick up the furniture of evicted families dumped on the sidewalk and carry it piece by piece, two, three, six flights up back to the old apartment.

Interference with enforcement of the law? Maybe. In Cleveland silver-haired Sheriff Sulzman, four times elected sheriff by a great popular majority in the County of Cuyahoga, most heavily populated county in the sovereign state of Ohio, called us aside one time, when he found himself way behind in carrying out the hundreds of writs of eviction issued by the local courts. We had interfered too often, with too many street fights and minor riots, and the arms of his deputies were getting weary with both fighting and lugging furniture down.

“Listen, boys,” he said, “why can’t we get together on this? Let’s be sensible. Why fight? Why not make it easier for both of us? I have to carry out the orders of the courts. Let’s have a system. We’ll carry a few sticks of furniture out to satisfy the judgment of the court and you won’t interfere. You will then only have to carry a few pieces back. Everybody is happy and nobody gets hurt.”

It worked out fine. Who said the Communists wouldn’t cooperate with law-enforcement agencies?

We organized hunger marches to dramatize the plight of the unemployed. The “marchers” traveled by trucks and they were showered with so much food at every stop by local citizens who gathered around them in sympathy that many of those “marchers” had gained a few pounds by the time they returned. One truck broke down—it had not only been fixed free but came back with two new tires as a gift from some garage man on the road.

In some places bloody fights took place. We didn’t start them, it was the police that attacked us, particularly in company-owned towns. We were met with threats, with denunciations, with arrests, with deportations. Firehoses bowled us off our feet with torrents of icy water in subzero weather. We were met with police clubs, blackjacks, riot guns, machine guns, even with tanks, led in person by bemedaled General Douglas MacArthur in a steel helmet, on the fiats of Anacostia in Washington.

Scores of us were killed, hundreds of us were wounded and jailed, thousands of us were beaten, had our skulls cracked.

But we couldn’t be silenced. Hundreds of thousands of the unemployed followed us, millions of the starving prayed for our success.

We developed lungs of leather and we demanded!

Mayor Davis of Cleveland once told a group of newspapermen—I was one of them—”Those people are too arrogant. Maybe if they were to ask politely we’d let them have something, but I won’t give in to demands.”

It wasn’t arrogance. It was sound tactics.

Those who ask are timid. A supplicant puts himself in a subservient position, he accepts his inferior position as preordained. He submits his fate to the whim of his patron; he proclaims in advance he has no rightful claim and that he would be grateful for whatever favors are shown—please! He begs for charity.

By demanding relief we asserted our claim that all men willing to work in an organized society are entitled to a job, that the government has a responsibility for the welfare of all the governed. That it is the responsibility of governments to keep their economic systems balanced, that a government has to interfere when one third of a nation is ill-fed or nonfed, ill-clothed or nonclothed, ill-sheltered or nonsheltered.

President Herbert Hoover was a man of brains, but his mind did not comprehend that. He had brought the land to near chaos and ruin.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt was a man of heart—his heart comprehended that, and he saved our American form of government.

We demanded, and that was rude. We demanded, and we wouldn’t be sent to the backdoor for a handout. When one demands, you have to lick him or negotiate with him—one or the other. When they couldn’t lick us, rather they licked us often, but when they found we wouldn’t stay licked, they had to negotiate.

It was a fight. What a fight! In the end we won the major part of our immediate demands, thus helping to restore the stability of the capitalist system—although Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin, who inspired us, had exactly the opposite in mind.

We got the dole.

We got relief baskets.

We got Home Relief—in cash.

We got W.P.A., P.W.A., H.O.L.C., F.H.A, and the other F.H.A. (Farms and Homes Administration).

We got Unemployment Insurance and Social Security.

We got the philosophy embodied in the first article in our Constitution re-established, that our government is responsible for the general welfare of the people and must interfere in the economic life of the nation to secure this.

Say what you please! Deny if you wish! Distort our role, or minimize it; give credit for the above achievement to whomever you wish!

One fact is outstanding—it cannot be denied. The Communists were the only organized force during the early part of the depression that relentlessly, with never-ceasing energy, generated the constant pressure compelling those New Deal reforms.

The other day I saw a woman in front of me at the supermarket cash her unemployment insurance check. It was for $35. She had bought a basketful of groceries, butter, and half a smoked ham. She carefully counted her change, then, as an afterthought, she asked for a carton of cigarettes. She paid over the money for that too, tucking the change in her wallet.

I smiled and remarked, “It’s quite a load you have.” She smiled back and replied, “I prefer to do my shopping all in one, then I’m through for the week.” We both agreed that was a good idea and I watched her wheel the wire basket out to her car because her purchases were too heavy to carry by hand.

She was a young woman around twenty-four and she saw nothing unusual in that transaction. I was happy and reflected that was as it should be.

I recalled the riot at Kroger’s in Cleveland just about the time that young woman was born, not over a full carton but only a single pack of cigarettes. One of the unemployed, when presenting his relief voucher, had asked that a package of cigarettes be included. The manager refused; by orders of the City Council those relief vouchers should only be honored for food, and he righteously added that the unemployed should be thankful to get something to eat, the nerve of some of them asking even for cigarettes. Some comrades happened to be present and that store was nearly wrecked by the time the manager tremblingly offered to turn over that pack of cigarettes. That news traveled fast, stores outside of the Kroger chain took note of it also. The clerks were speedily instructed to disregard that order of the City Council. From that day on no storekeeper again raised the question whether the unemployed had the right to a smoke or not.

Violence? Persuasion maybe, with a singular lack of tact on both sides.

I also recall a sequel to that incident. The Communists organized a march on City Hall demanding that relief be paid in cash instead of food vouchers. A councilman with a big cigar in his mouth smiled ironically!

“So they could spend it on joy rides, or even cigars, I presume?” he baited the delegates.

That cigar was rammed down his throat and a full-scale riot ensued. The police rushed in and blood splattered the floor of the Cleveland Council Chambers. Heads were cracked and demonstrators were jailed. But we got the cash relief.

Violence? Yes. But be it remembered—we bore the brunt of it.

Deplorable? Maybe.

Un-American? Like a hungry stomach.

Subversive? Ask Andrew Jackson.

The ways of the Lord are inscrutable. God in His wisdom may choose whatever instrumentality to impose His will upon selfish men with hearts of stone-even card-carrying Communists.

Aye, that He may.

Come the Day of judgment, my plea for redemption shall rest on that.

My life in Canada soon settled into the routine of a party organizer in a more or less virgin field—differing from that of a missionary mainly in that the faith we preached was redemption through joining one of our organizations and salvation through revolution, through the overthrow of the capitalist system right here on earth. I tended my flock, made new converts, brought them to a closer understanding of life and society by lecturing on such subjects as evolution and the class structure of society, all strictly according to the gospel of Marx and Lenin. My congregation consisted mostly of peasants who had broken with their old church and came to look upon Communism as a new religion, on the editor of the Worker as not only their spiritual but their lay leader as well, bringing to him their personal problems as well as their disputes, and abiding by his authority. I was even called upon to deliver funeral orations in which I was expected to console the bereaved by extolling the virtues of the departed not only as a good family man but also as an outstanding example of a class conscious workingman. I was invited to name the newly born and I still take credit for naming none of them Vladimir after Lenin or Krupskaya after his widow.

The one incident that was anything but routine occurred at our May Day demonstration in Hamilton in 1930 and the memory of the part I played in it still makes me uneasy.

It all began when the party selected me chairman of the United May Day Committee which was formed to organize the demonstration. By that time I had become accustomed to leadership.

At our first meeting all went well and in harmony until a nonparty delegate raised the question of applying for a police permit. The delegates seemed in general agreement on the advisability of that—I alone stood in opposition. I reasoned that the police had shown increased apprehension of late over our growing activities, particularly among the unemployed, and by risking the denial of a permit we would be playing right into their hands. That would give them a pretext for smashing our demonstration and on top of this, to charge us with provoking a riot by willful violation of the police ban.

Leadership is a heady wine. One gets used to power just as easily as to having money enough to burn, without giving it a thought. Since the majority opinion seemed to be definitely against me I used the chair’s prerogative. I asked for someone to move that we should not apply for a police permit. Some comrade mumbled something to that effect; I called for seconding, some other comrade did so. I then immediately called for a voice vote and when a few comrades said “aye,” pronounced the motion carried.

At our next meeting one of the delegates made a peculiar report. He claimed that he had been approached by a police captain who objected to our announced route. Our plan called for marching up one main avenue and then turning right on the most important thoroughfare in the city. The police wanted us to turn left at that crossing to avoid traffic being paralyzed.

His report caused considerable agitation but I quickly ruled out all discussion of it. The way I interpreted it, that was merely a request to make things more convenient for the police. After all, we did want to tie up traffic; the worse the traffic jam, the greater the impression we’d make on the bourgeoisie.

At our final meeting a few days before May first, another delegate, this time the President of the Veterans’ Unemployment Council, came in with a still graver report. He had been called in by the Police Chief himself and warned that under no condition would the police allow us to turn right on the main avenue. If we turned left, they would leave us alone. But if we turned right they would await us with machine guns and we would then be held responsible for whatever ensued.

This threat couldn’t be ignored. A number of delegates asked for the floor at once, including two members of the Local Executive Committee of the Party. To be democratic I recognized a delegate of one of the Unemployment Councils first—besides, I wanted to know how he felt. He spoke for changing the route, arguing that what we were primarily interested in was a demonstration, not a bloody clash with the police. He spoke with heat and it made good sense to me. The majority seemed to agree with him.

After a few other delegates spoke in a similar vein, I finally recognized one of the official Communist Party delegates, one of the members of our Local Executive Committee.

He was vehement. May Day was a day for “militant” demonstration. The workers themselves would decide where and how they wanted to demonstrate. The route of the demonstration had already been publicized, binding us to our plan. If the police interfered, the responsibility would rest squarely on them, and on the capitalist government!

After he spoke the other party members became silent. They did not approve of his stand, but the party had spoken and that settled it for them. It settled it for me too, although I did not like it either. That police threat might well have been a bluff, to scare us out of tying up traffic at that key corner. On the other hand, the threat of machine guns might not be an idle one in view of the growing nervousness of the city authorities. But the party had spoken, I was the chairman, it was my task to put its decision into execution. After the motion to leave our route of march unchanged had been carried, although with a notable lack of enthusiasm, I decided I might as well put the best face on it.

“If the Police Chief approaches any one of you delegates again, simply tell him we’ll march as announced, that we’ll turn to the right even if they face us with cannons. The streets belong to the people. The working class of Hamilton will assert its right to demonstrate peacefully even though that may inconvenience the bourgeoisie.”

That speech was met by great applause and it restored the confidence of all delegates except mine. Inwardly I felt that our stand was wrong. The real issue was not whether the police were provoking us or we were provoking the police, but that a good number of people might be gravely hurt. The party had egged me on, I egged the party on! They had committed me, I had committed them. Leadership meant responsibility—come what may, I would have to face it.

May Day broke sunny and beautiful. The profusion of red flags and banners put the crowd at the assembly point in a festive mood. Both sidewalks were jammed with onlookers—those prudent comrades who were one with us in spirit but who nevertheless considered it wiser to separate their bodies from the common cause.

It took quite a while to line up the column in the most colorful and yet, if attacked, the most effective position for defense. There were a considerable number of women and children among the marchers and to protect them we concentrated the huskiest men on the flanks so that from there they could rush quickly into the fighting. The plan called for me to march in the lead with one member of the United May Day Committee on my right and another on my left.

We started our march on schedule, singing the Internationale, and shouting slogans at intervals. The crowds on the sidewalks kept step with our progress, people waved to us from the windows, the sun shone bright and warm—it was an exhilarating demonstration.

As we neared the contested intersection I subconsciously slowed down which must have affected the spirit of the crowd. The singing died down and this in turn reacted on me. I felt my feet dragging and when we reached the crossing the column came to a slow halt.

The street left of the intersection lay clear of all traffic. The crossing to the right was blocked curb to curb by a line of motorcycles. Two policemen in full battle dress manned each motorcycle, the driver leaning forward, one foot on the pedal in readiness. The other in the gondola slouched low in the unmistakable posture of a machine gunner ready for instant action. A police captain, feet planted apart, was facing us in the center of the road.

The marchers were moving up closer. There was a momentum to that column—it was physically pressing me on. I felt the eyes of the comrades boring into my back. The Communist Party was leading that demonstration. I was the picked leader of the party.

To the left the street stretched open and enticing. It beckoned: “This way to joy and peace!”

To the right the police line was tensing. That way lay fire, flame, and bullets—the road to destruction.

It was my responsibility to the party, it was my decision to make. I made it.

I raised my right arm and shouted loud and clear: “Lo-o-ng li-i-lve the soli-i-da-a-a-arity of the interna-a-ational working claa-a-ss!”

“Long live the solidarity of the international working class,” the shout thundered back from the crowd.

“Long live May Day!” I shouted, and brought my arm down decisively, pointing firm and straight to the right, to the police line ahead. I executed a sharp right turn and marched resolutely ahead, the column following in my wake.

I was marching on stiffly. One . . . two . . . three . . . I drew my shoulders back . . . Four . . . five . . . six . . . A few more steps and the police would open fire! The Police Captain raised his arm in a signal and shouted a command. Here it comes! I marched grimly on. One . . . two . . . three . . . The motorcycles came alive with a roar . . . Four . . . five . . . They are heading into us . . . Six . . . They are going to ride us down Seven . . . I threw my chest out. Shoot, you bastards, shoot! Yes . . . ! No . . . ! Yes . . . ! The motorcycles parted into two, the road was no longer blocked, the motorcycles were pulling over to the curb to let our column pass.

An immense cheer rose and the column broke into the Internationale, we marched victoriously on, shouting and singing, and I changed my stride from parade step to route. I looked back—everyone was happy and triumphant. I was not elated, I felt remote and detached as I kept marching on.

That evening, at the May Day dance and celebration, I was listless. I shook hands, accepted congratulations, answered the small talk, but my attention was not there, my mind was hovering over a vast empty space with no landmarks on which to alight. I excused myself early, went home and to bed. I was curiously exhausted, but I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t read—the page blurred in front of my eyes. I turned off the light and closed my eyes. Sleep wouldn’t come. Suddenly the sky lit up and there was that police motorcycle line right in front of my eyes, the column in back of me pressing me on, and I was out in front, the decision resting with me.

I watched the motorcycles roar to life and suddenly I saw those machine guns spitting fire, heard the screaming of the comrades, saw men, women, and children crumpled up on the pavement, moaning in pain. I was responsible for all that; it had not happened that way, yet my action could very well have resulted in such a massacre!

I tried to twist and turn out of it, I argued with that phantasmagoria but it wouldn’t dissolve. That was not leadership, that was not responsibility to the masses, that was an out-and-out provocation. I, the party leader, had deliberately disregarded the possible consequences, had led the workers to be massacred—to uphold what? A party decision and my position of leadership. But for the mercy of that police captain, many of those workers would now be lying in blood, screaming in agony, those women and children, too—all for the glory of the Communist Party!

I shook and shivered until sleep brought oblivion.

Comrade Resnick, the local party leader, was a cheerful little man in his late forties; he ran an alteration tailor shop. When I introduced myself he greeted me most effusively. He was happy to welcome me, the Local Executive Committee of the party was having a meeting in his shop that evening, would I care to attend? That was a greater stroke of luck than I had anticipated. Now I could lay my problems before a high body of seasoned revolutionary leaders and the very name “Local Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Hamilton, Ontario, Canada” awed me. A customer came in just then with a pair of pants to be pressed and I left, promising to return that night.

There were six people in the rear of Comrade Resnick’s shop when I arrived. Comrade Resnick introduced me proudly as “a leading comrade from the States, the Editor of the Worker, and the leader of the Canadian Hungarian Movement.” The comrades greeted me with a deference which I found disturbing.

My uneasiness increased when Comrade Resnick announced that the L.E.C. (Local Executive Committee) was grateful for the presence of such a leading comrade in Hamilton who could greatly help them in doing more effective party work. He moved that I be drafted to become a member of the Local Executive Committee and before I had a chance to protest, I found myself duly elected.

As the meeting progressed, I was asked my opinion on every point on the agenda. I did not know the City of Hamilton, I wasn’t much interested in their problems, my mind was on my own. I did not participate in the discussion for I was only half listening and when pressed for my opinion I gave it only after all of them had had their say. I did not know then that that was the formula employed by all party leaders; as a result all my opinions were approved.

As the meeting progressed it became clear I couldn’t expect any guidance from that group, they were taking their leadership from me, an utter tyro.

The main topic of the meeting was an unemployed demonstration, the first to be held in Hamilton. Unemployment was growing rapidly in Canada and industrial centers like Hamilton were the hardest hit. They had been promised a speaker from the Central Committee in Toronto, now the problem was, how to reach the unemployed and induce them to turn out. They were planning to mimeograph five thousand leaflets, a ridiculously small number, I thought. Further discussion established that they had a problem distributing even that number because of the 36 comrades on the membership roll less than half were “active.”

I proposed to print 5,000 additional leaflets and to distribute them with the aid of my Hungarians. I also suggested that we notify the local newspapers about the demonstration, thus giving it added publicity, and I volunteered for that task. Both proposals were met by admiring comments. They must have thought me a wizard of an organizer. . . .

The demonstration fell on a very cold winter day. The unemployed were shabby and poorly clad, they were miserable and shivered in the icy wind. Ten o’clock passed, then ten-fifteen, the speaker from Toronto still hadn’t arrived. The crowd was growing impatient, even I was beginning to feel the cold. After a while I told Comrade Resnick to forget about the Toronto speaker and start or the crowd would disintegrate. To my utter amazement he then proposed that I speak, taking for granted that I was an experienced speaker. Before I half knew what was happening, they boosted me to an empty steel drum amidst stormy applause.

I was utterly confused. The barrel had a sprung bottom, it teetered precariously under my weight, and my mind was concentrating more on how to keep from falling off than on what I was supposed to say. The applause ended, hundreds of pairs of eyes were fixed on me expectantly, the crowd moved closer and so did the Canadian bobbies. I had no choice, I had to speak. But say what? I remembered the text of our leaflet and started off with that, trying to think ahead while I was talking. The crowd received it well, applauding the slogans calling for relief measures and unemployment insurance. That was good as far as it went, but it was over too fast—I had to keep talking. I remembered my early days of unemployment and hunger and went into a description of that episode, reliving it as I talked, embellishing it as I went along. It went over well. Finally I noticed a commotion around the members of the L.E.C. and saw a stranger talking with them, he must be the Toronto speaker we were expecting. I cut my speech short and breathed a sigh of great relief as I dismounted and felt solid ground under my feet again. I had spoken in public, in English, to a strange audience, in a foreign country from a bobbing barrel, starting off a demonstration. There was nothing to it.

Of the many comments I received on that maiden speech of mine, two stand out in my mind. One comrade wanted to know why I had been facing only one part of the audience; why hadn’t I rotated from left to right taking in all the audience like other speakers, instead of merely rocking back and forth, and facing but a single segment of the listeners. Frankly, that had never occurred to me. Evidently there were techniques to public speaking other than merely bellowing words at the top of one’s lungs.

The other remark was intended as a high compliment but I fail to consider it as such even to the present day. It was uttered by one of the Hungarian comrades in the group who came up to me proudly to congratulate me.

“You know, comrade,” he said, “we have listened to speeches in English before, but we couldn’t understand them. But when you spoke we understood every single word you said.”

The others chimed in enthusiastically and one of them added:

“I never knew I understood English so well until I heard you speak this morning!” I was sorely troubled in consequence, wondering how many non-Hungarians in that crowd, if any, had understood my heavily accented English.

Be that as it may, we succeeded in organizing an Unemployment Council as a result of that demonstration. Later on we held other demonstrations and additional Councils were organized.

It was all started by that Local Executive Committee of six members, by a total membership of 36 Communists in that town of 150,000. In other towns throughout Canada other inept Communists of similarly insignificant numbers did likewise and the influence of the party grew rapidly among the unemployed.

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.

Taking a Pullman to Canada instead of a coach as was expected from a Party functionary, was my own idea. It proved to have been a sound one even though the difference came out of my own pocketbook. I had no difficulty at the border. When the Canadian immigration officials woke me before dawn, the winter sky—gray and streaked with smoke from the engine—appeared grim, inhospitable and forbidding. I was sleepy and yawned—they asked very few questions. All they were interested in was how long I intended to stay, was I an American citizen, and how much money I had.

I replied I intended to stay a few months, was a naturalized citizen, and had enough money for my needs. They did not ask me to show them my citizenship papers but they wanted to see my money. It was then December, 1929. Unemployment was steadily increasing and although no one as yet suspected that unemployment would soon rise to crisis proportions, officialdom was already worrying. Before my departure I had closed out my checking account and had a thousand dollars in travelers checks and a few hundred dollars in cash on me. I showed them that, which ended the inspection.

I entered legally, had answered all questions truthfully, violated no law.

When a few months later the drive to deport alien Communists from Canada panicked quite a few comrades, the consciousness that I hadn’t violated any law enabled me to stand my post calmly without the furtiveness which draws suspicion and leads to denunciation. Nor was I molested.

I reached my destination, Hamilton in Ontario, early Friday morning. No one met me at the station. I left my trunk in the baggage room and took a taxi to the editorial offices of the Kanadai Magyar Munkas (Hungarian Canadian Worker). The taxi took me to a side street in the working class section and stopped in front of a residential building. I was apprehensive that the driver had stopped at the wrong address but I did not want to arouse his suspicions and got out. There seemed to be no life in the house, even the street looked deserted. I was about to walk up the stoop when I discovered an open concrete stairway leading to the basement. I walked down to inquire from the janitor, or whoever would be there. The steps led to a door with a glass panel over which a window shade had been drawn. Tacked on the door was a printed news strip yellowed with exposure, the masthead of the Kanadai Magyar Munkas (from here on to be referred to as Worker to make it easier for the reader).

I tried the door, it was locked. I somehow sensed there was life behind and knocked. The door was soon opened by a sleepy-eyed man in his shirtsleeves who had evidently been sleeping on the leather couch under the window. He was rubbing his eyes and for some reason looked embarrassed. I asked him where Comrade Lustig lived—I cannot now recall the party name he used in Canada.

The man didn’t know but said Lustig usually came in around ten. He then asked me whether I was the new comrade they were expecting. When I told him I was he started to apologize for sleeping in the office; he had been dispossessed and he hoped to be taken in soon by some of his buddies.

The editorial office of the Worker, for that’s what that basement was, had only one window the top of which was level with the sidewalk, affording no other view than an occasional dog or the legs of the passers-by. It was lighted by two large unshaded electric bulbs; whitewash on the damp walls was flaky and green in patches. The center of the room was taken up by a crudely nailed, twelve foot table with two benches made of unpainted, roughly planed fir. That, with the leather couch, some crude shelving made of discarded orange crates, and a number of folding chairs, comprised all the furniture. There was no desk, typewriter, filing cabinet—there was nothing in that room to indicate even remotely that it was an editorial office except perhaps the disarranged pile of Workers stacked in one corner.

I tucked a copy of the Worker in my pocket and told the comrade I was going out for a walk and breakfast; if Lustig arrived before I returned let him wait for me.

Hamilton was the second-largest city after Toronto in the province of Ontario, with a population of a little over 150,000 in 1929, a drab industrial town. As I walked down one dreary street after another shivering under the icy blasts of the arctic Canadian winter winds, my spirit sank. This was proletarian life all right, the life I had chosen, but now that I was face to face with it, I felt myself shrinking inside. I was both angry with me and feeling sorry for myself. I thought of Lee and Swannee, of Helen and Ruth, of my snug apartment with my collection of records and the oversize bed. What the hell was I doing here in a basement in Canada, messing around with the proletariat! I cursed myself for a romantic fool as I walked into a lunchroom, glowering over the Worker as I waited for my order.

The Worker was a lousy sheet, full of typographical errors; it consisted entirely of reprints clipped from the Uj Elore and from Hungarian publications in Moscow and Paris. The only items identifying it as a Canadian publication were a few puffs about bazaars and affairs for the benefit of the Worker. Comrade Lustig hadn’t exerted himself in editing that paper, that was sure.

The lunchroom was agreeably warm, the hotcakes were fluffy, the bacon crisp, and the coffee strong—emotion was receding before reason. The life of a pioneer was always one of hardship, the fathers of the American Revolution did not whore away their time in bed. History was not made by weak sybarites. What the hell was I bitching about? I had to be ready to make sacrifices. The sun was also coming out; feebly as it shone, it still radiated light and heat. As I retraced my steps to the Worker I was definitely in a confident mood.

I entered without knocking this time. The room was crowded and the air was hazy with tobacco smoke. My nose was assailed by a heavy sourish smell, a mixture of dried sweat from unwashed bodies, seldom changed underwear and dirty socks, the reek of old boots and the only suit that is being lived in, the penetrating odor of garlic mingled with cheap hair oil—the “peasant smell” they called it in Hungary. It was the universal smell of the poor that always hits you when you enter the cramped quarters of the underprivileged—whether in a Mission House or a tenement—the smell of humans who are overcrowded, who have neither the sanitary facilities nor the necessary change of clothes to keep themselves fresh and clean. Poverty stinks everywhere, and so do the poor.

I paused inside the door to get my bearings. I saw Lustig there surrounded by a crowd of men with typical Hungarian faces. Lustig greeted me with a handshake and with what almost passed for a smile of welcome—that was about the friendliest he had ever acted toward me. He then introduced me to the comrades as Kalman Lakatos, my party name in Canada. He did not introduce them to me individually and I felt like a man visiting distant relatives for the first time, who is being slyly appraised by all, and who in turn is trying to puzzle out what his relationship to each may be.

The comrades were deferential in a friendly way, they asked me questions, primarily about the UJ Elore, but also about the Hungarian movement in America in general. I was able to answer the first but had to parry the second because I was fairly ignorant about the movement outside New York. Luckily, as their questions showed, they weren’t much better informed either and I passed the test.

About a half hour later Lustig pulled out his watch and announced he had to leave at once if he were to catch the train back to New York.

This was contrary to what I had been told to expect. Lustig was supposed to stay with me for at least two weeks until I became familiar with my duties. More important still, he was to take me to the Central Committee of the Canadian Communist Party and ask them to provide me with close guidance and (this is what Mayer emphasized most) with a subsidy for the Worker from the secret press funds of the Comintern. Now Lustig was pulling out, leaving me stranded like a blind owl in a strange belfry.

“Just a minute, Comrade Lustig. You haven’t told me a thing about the paper, you haven’t taken me to the print shop, I am not even acquainted with these comrades here. There are many problems we will have to discuss before you leave.” I kept my voice low and tried to keep the edge out of it, but we were in an open room, all present had heard me, and now they faced us in silence. It looked like the beginning of a row and they were all aware of it, Lustig particularly so. He did not reply to me directly, he addressed us at large.

“Comrade Lakatos does not know the great organizational progress we have achieved during my short stay here. I am proud of the Canadian Hungarian movement!” He said that with a flourish and flashed us a wide oratorical smile which, I noticed, met with feeble response. Then turning to me, he related how he had reorganized the entire movement, how well the Canadian Hungarian Bureau was now functioning, how he had appointed Comrade Kovacs, a slender young man of about twenty-four, a tool and die maker apprentice, business manager of the Worker. He further informed me that there was more than enough copy in the hands of the printer for the next issue, leaving me a full week to get acquainted.

Next he turned to Kovacs and asked him how much money the Worker had. Kovacs emptied his pockets, counted the contents including the small change, and announced it was twenty-nine dollars and some pennies. Lustig then took twenty-five dollars out of that pile to pay for his room and his fare back to New York, shook hands with everyone there, including me, and left. Dismayed as I was, I couldn’t help noticing that there was a singular lack of warmth in those handshakes, that not a single comrade bothered to see him to the door.

The next afternoon, I stopped at the print shop and found Lustig had misinformed me. Far from having an abundance of copy, the next issue of the Worker was two full pages short.

A Bureau meeting had been scheduled for that night in the Worker‘s office. Twelve comrades were present and while I was waiting for them to open the meeting I occupied myself writing copy, all-Canadian news for a change, clipped from the Toronto papers. Finally I asked them why they delayed calling the meeting to order. A short discussion made it clear they expected me to do that, the comrade sent in from the States had always been the Secretary of the Bureau and the leader of the Canadian Hungarian movement.

The following night I attended a meeting of the Workers Singing Society; I wanted to see how one of our mass organizations functioned. Out of the fourteen singers in that chorus, eleven were familiar to me-they were the members of the Bureau.

The next night I went to the meeting of the Workers Dramatic Club. I found nine actors there, all of them members of the Bureau.

I was also asked to attend the meeting of the International Labor Defense but by then I was suspicious enough to ask who the members were. My hunch proved correct. They also had a Hungarian branch of the Workers International Relief organized—all Bureau members. The comrades were also talking about organizing a Workers Soccer Football Club—they had just the right number of prospects for it—eleven members of the Bureau for the team and the twelfth member for a substitute. Those comrades were certainly well organized.

At that time I blamed Lustig for the situation. It did not take me long to learn that this was typical Communist organizational practice. Many Communist organizations existed only on paper, their active membership consisted of the same pitifully small number of party members. This explains why the same names keep turning up on dozens of membership rolls on the list of designated subversive organizations.

In less than two weeks I had to face up to the truth—there was no Hungarian workers movement in Canada except in a very loose sense. The movement was actually in its infancy and it fell on me to chart its course, although I myself lacked previous organizational experience. As it happened, this ignorance proved more of an asset than a handicap; it enabled me to develop my own methods along pragmatic lines and they worked out far better than those of Lustig’s mechanical party procedures.

Shortly after I went on the Uj Elore, Comrade Lustig disappeared. My query as to what happened to him met with a shrug of the shoulder meaning it was none of my business. It wasn’t and I soon forgot about him although from then on I had to carry most of his work load also.

My eight weeks were about up when Gus Mayer, Kovess’ successor, called me in. He was a former blacksmith from Indiana, built like a bear; he gave the impression of massive strength and unshakable proletarian conviction and sincerity behind his rough manners. He asked, rather told me, that I was an American citizen, wasn’t I? When I affirmed that, he growled:

“Go and get packed. You’re leaving for Canada.”

Before I had a chance to recover, Mayer outlined the situation. The Canadian Hungarian revolutionary movement had been organized three years previously by the American Hungarian Bureau. Within that short period of time the Canadian movement had grown to the point where it had started a weekly paper of its own. However, the Canadian Hungarians were mostly semiliterate peasants and they depended for top leadership and for editing their paper on comrades sent from United States. That’s where Lustig was now. He was due to be relieved but the comrade sent to replace him, not being a citizen, had been turned back at the Canadian border, as was the second man sent after him. Lustig, who was a family man and eager to return, reported that he had reorganized the Canadian movement and it now had a firm leadership of its own. He proposed that I be sent to replace him; I was sufficiently qualified to edit their paper and that was all that was expected of me; the newly reorganized Canadian Bureau was strong enough to provide me with political leadership.

I protested immediately. All I had promised Kovess was that I’d help out the Uj Elore for two months and my time was up. I was quitting that Saturday.

“No, you won’t!” Mayer banged on the table. “It is a party decision. You’ll go to Canada or we’ll expel you from the party and publicly expose you!”

“Go ahead!” I was mad. “You can start right now!” I headed for the door.

Mayer’s attitude changed abruptly. He told me about those poor peasants lost in Canada without leadership, the prey of any Hungarian reactionary who might happen along. He accused me of being one of those bleeding hearts who cry over the plight of the ignorant, exploited masses but who wouldn’t lift a linger to better their lot. He reminded me of some of the lectures I gave on evolution and on the origin of Christianity before Hungarian clubs and how well they were received—what right did I have to deny those peasants in Canada, so eager for the knowledge withheld from them by the feudal landlords of Hungary, to understand the world in which they live. Besides, it would be for two months only. That was my opportunity to live among the masses, among the proletarians, the real dispossessed, to learn from them and become a seasoned revolutionary.

I was tempted.

“For two months, did you say?”

“Yes, two months. This is a promise,” he added solemnly. “I won’t let you down. Any time you need any kind of assistance, money, just write me. I want you to take the train tonight.”

I did not take the train that night, I left the day after. Mayer gave me twenty dollars for my fare and expenses, which indentally came to more than one hundred dollars. I had to buy a trunk and other travel gear; the Pullman ticket alone cost more than the twenty I had received from Mayer.

I turned my apartment over to Kovess who had asked for the use of it, promising he would take good care of it in my absence.

By the time I was relieved by the Bureau and returned from Canada, nine months later, my apartment was long gone—furnishings, books, and all.

I learned many things in that nine-month interval. The most important lesson, however, still eluded me.

A Communist promise binds only those to whom it is given, but it is never binding on the Communist leaders themselves.

The Uj Elore was a Communist newspaper, which is quite different from the concept generally evoked by the term “newspaper.” Its main function was not the dissemination of news but agitation and propaganda. Every item it published had to carry a strong Communist slant. The capitalists had to be portrayed as brutal subhumans and the proletarians as either akin to angels in virtue, or as cruelly wronged victims of the capitalist system.

The editor was Lajos Bebrits, a tall imposing man weighing over two hundred pounds, with a friendly smile and deceptively shy academic manners. He was then just under forty, a former railroad official in Hungary, a revolutionary from his youth, who had fled jail to come to the United States.

Bebrits was a man of encyclopedic knowledge who towered head and shoulders in intellect and character above everyone else in the Hungarian movement. He took an instant liking to me, the only friend I was to have on that staff.

The news editor was John Nagy, his real name Joseph Gyetvay, a former Catholic priest defrocked for his revolutionary activities in Hungary. He was around forty; somewhat hunched from the habit of carrying one shoulder higher than the other with his neck held to one side, as if fearful of a blow. He was a secretive, humorless, uncommunicative man with a narrow sectarian outlook and rather limited mentality. To my surprise he was a writer of penny proletarian novels in which idealized but sterile housemaids were relentlessly pursued and cruelly forced to submit to the lust of depraved, sex-fiend aristocrats whose diet, because of their wealth, consisted exclusively of caviar, roast pheasant and champagne, nutritionally a rather poor fare. (The last I heard, Gyetvay was in Ankara, the Hungarian ambassador to Turkey.)

The third man on the staff was Emery Lustig, a young, broad-shouldered soccer-football player who was esteemed an excellent organizer because of the effective way he was dealing with the Hungarian followers of Lovestone who refused to embrace the new Foster line. There was nothing subtle about his methods; he would invade a Lovestoneite meeting with his gang and break it up physically. (The last I heard he was district leader of an electrical workers’ union allegedly still under Communist control somewhere in New York State.)

The fourth man was John Santo, a member of the illegal Young Communist movement in Rumania before he came to the United States on a student visa. He had been working as a barber in Chicago before Nagy brought him to the Uj Elore staff. (He was to rise to a high position in the government Meat Trust in Communist Hungary after having been deported from here.)

The Uj Elore was a national daily with a circulation of 50,000 from New York to California. Most of our copies went by mail to subscribers who would receive them anywhere from one to five days after publication. Under those circumstances it mattered very little whether the news in the Uj Elore was printed one or even three days after the event occurred.

Our favorite news source was the New York Times. The news we clipped had to have class interest and we would rewrite it to suit the policy of our paper. Of course all newspapers, capitalist or Communist, reflect the policy of the publisher. However, when it came to slanting the news we had no peers—even Time magazine was a novice by comparison. The Time staff had greater finesse because of the higher cultural level of their subscribers yet we had the edge on them because we were not handicapped by a feeling of delicacy among our readers. Where Time magazine had to resort to some such mild adjective as “unkempt” to create a subtle prejudice against a labor organizer, we could bluntly call a capitalist “bloated,” and if we wanted to please our readers even more, we would add “with the blood of workers.”

The two examples cited below should suffice to illustrate how we treated our news stories. Both items were clipped from the inside pages of the New York Times, recorded there in a few brief lines.

The first reported an explosion in a coal mine in West Virginia in which two miners with garbled but unmistakably Hungarian names were killed, and three injured; it said that an investigation had been started to determine the cause of the accident. I was handed that news item to rewrite and did so carefully, correcting the spelling of the names of the victims, and then handed it to Nagy. After Nagy read it he snorted, gave me a withering glance, and retired with it to his desk. A short while later when reading proof on his version of that item, I had no doubt left in me about my “lack of political development.”

The story carried a five-column headline.

BLOOD FEEDS COAL BARONS’ GREED

It was subheaded:

Coal Profits Demand New Human Victims

A lower subhead proclaimed:

Fresh Orphans and Widows for Wall Street Molochs

Wheeling, W. Va. The grinning death skulls of the Coal Barons, those blood brothers of the Wall Street imperialist finance capitalists, are again licking their greasy chops in glee. They have just fed anew on miners’ flesh, on miners’ steaming blood to satisfy their blood-bloated bellies. Those vampires chose for their latest victims two unfortunate Hungarian workers who had fled the brutal, torturing, Fascist hyenas of Horthy Hungary only to die in agony on the profit-slippery altars of American plutocracy.

The story then gave a bloodcurdling description of the explosion, of the scorching flames and choking fumes, gave precise details of how the two miners were mangled by the collapsing walls of the tunnels, and how the blast seared and injured many other miners who at that writing were on the verge of death, writhing in pain.

Next it went into a denunciation of Wall Street, the coal barons, the Horthy government, charging them all with special responsibility for that disaster. The news story ended with a ringing appeal to all Hungarian miners to join the National Miners Union, under the leadership of the Communist Party, and subscribe to the Uj Elore which could never be bought, nor intimidated, which alone told the truth!

I congratulated Nagy on that story, praising his insight. He wasn’t gracious in accepting my compliments. He implied that I could read Marx until doomsday and still fail to become a good Communist reporter; to write a good Communist news story one had to be part of the class struggle.

The second story, that impressed me even more, had also been written by Nagy. It was based on a brief dispatch in the New York Times stating that the Budapest police had arrested three cabinetmakers for distributing Communist propaganda leaflets in their shop. Without giving any further details, the dispatch concluded by saying that the police were investigating the source of those leaflets.

The next day the Uj Elore carried this eight-column headline:

THE HORTHY GOVERNMENT IS QUAKING!

It was subheaded:

Savage Reprisals, Bloody Police Terror fail to Prevent Bold Communist Action.

The lead went something like this:

Terror struck today in the heart of the murderous, degenerate, bloodsucking ruling class of Hungary. Panicked by fear, they again hid behind the shutters of their castles built with the blood of the destitute Hungarian workers and peasants. Once more they shriveled under the hot breath of revolt, heard the crowing of the red rooster setting flame to their rooftops. The proletariat of Hungary received new hope and courage from this fearless and bold action of the underground Communist Party which raised its red banner high to show that the time of the final reckoning is rapidly approaching.

It was a three column long story, all based on that six-line news item in the New York Times. That was dialectical materialism in practice, a science that not only foretells the future but also divines the past. That couldn’t be learned from books either, you had to live it to master it.

Once I nearly came close to it. We were short of a filler for our Sunday supplement and I was handed a large glossy of a French movie actress on the Riviera wearing a fabulous half-million-dollar pearl necklace. I was asked to write an appropriate caption for it.

It was quite a photo. Posed by a French photographer, the lady had laid bare practically all but her soul—the pearls were the least of her physical attractions. I sat gazing at that enticing figure for a long time trying to class-angle it. Finally I gave up, oblivious of my political inadequacy. Just for fun, to spoof that solemn Nagy, I wrote:

X-Y, celebrated actress, favorite playmate of the parasitic scions of the ruthless oppressors of the French toilers, displaying her fabulous pearls worth $500,000, the cost of which has been squeezed out of the hide of the starving French masses.

I was grinning when I handed it to Nagy. He didn’t notice that. He read the caption carefully, reached for his pencil and made a few corrections.

He changed playmate to concubine, celebrated to notorious, displaying to brazenly flaunting, raised the $500,000 to a million, and stuck the adjective feudal in front of the noun oppressors. Otherwise it had passed the test.

Evidently I had acquired the secret yet I made little use of it. Every time I caught myself straying into that kind of Communist journalism I simply recalled those pearls, grinned, and stopped in time.

Our fiction was clipped mostly from the German Communist newspapers—this was before Hitler. Once, tired of translating those dull and repetitious stories, I protested to Bebrits. In those German Communist epics the capitalists were invariably inhuman, cunning and cowardly monsters while the workers were all outspoken and self-sacrificing heroic demigods.

I told Bebrits those conceptions were childish, that the true picture was quite the opposite. Most workers were far from being outspoken; in my personal experience they were a most easily intimidated lot. I proposed that I rewrite those stories, adding a touch of reality, thus making them more believable to the workers who could then see a closer resemblance to themselves.

This was in the evening, after the paper had been put to bed and the two of us were left alone in the office.

Bebrits sighed, stuck his pen wearily into his inkpot, stretched, and then leaned back in his chair.

“You are an intelligent person,” he addressed me mildly, “a man of culture, which is rare among our young Hungarian comrades. Yet you don’t know about workers at all.”

I protested that immediately. I knew workers, I had worked in shops with them for eight years, I had eaten with them, stood in the fur market with them, I was on familiar terms with more workers than the rest of the Uj Elore staff put together. In fact, I was the only genuine manual worker on the entire staff.

Bebrits heard me out and then replied.

“You know individual workers, but not the working class. The average worker is a piece of turd, a cowardly, cunning, selfish, double-crossing, often moronic son of a bitch. He is deformed in body by toil and warped in mind, willing to betray his own grandmother. He is servile and fawns on his boss, ready to tuck in his wagging tail and run at the first harsh word from his master.”

I looked at Bebrits in astonishment. I would never have gone that far in my indictment. Bebrits continued, his eyes lost in contemplation.

“I know what workers are like from way back when I was assistant railroad station master in Transylvania. Of course not all workers fit that description. I know workers from that famous railroad strike in Hungary during World War I that set Germany’s Rumanian offensive back an entire week by stopping all troop movements.

“What good would it do to the working class or to the Communist Party to depict the workers as they are, to hold a mirror up to them and say, ‘Take a look at yourself and see what miserable crud you are!’ The worker knows that better than we do, he would crawl back deeper into his dank crevice, even more hopeless, even more dejected and defeated.

“What do we do? We paint him a picture which shows him a giant with the features of Apollo and the muscles of Hercules, brave as Mars and towering like Jupiter.

“We keep presenting him with this picture and drumming into him: This is your portrait, this is the true mirror. All other mirrors are deceptive, they have always been deceptive, they were purposely so invented by the capitalists to reflect a distorted image in order to keep you humble and ignorant, to hide your real strength and character from you.

“We keep drilling that into his head, we play up examples, we portray situations where the hero—and the hero is always the worker—performs the most prodigious feats of daring, until the worker starts rubbing his eyes, begins flexing his muscles and vaguely wonders if he isn’t actually the kind of worker we insist he is, instead of the miserable wretch he knows himself to be.

“We give him self-confidence and some day, somewhere, the occasion arises where he is put to test. He will inevitably be provoked by some exceptionally revolting act of capitalist injustice, some stupid act of suppression, some extremely cruel act of exploitation which capitalism by its very nature must historically invoke. He will then remember the countless examples we have cited him and, as likely as not, he will rise to the occasion. He will then discover that there is truth in what we have said, that by virtue of his overwhelming numerical superiority he is far stronger, more capable of revolutionary action than he has ever believed himself to be.

“Even though he still has his own doubts about himself, he believes that the other workers with him are more of that heroic mold. Thus he gains strength from the presumed courage of his fellow workers and finds that mass courage really is superior, that ultimately it can sweep all resistance away.

“This is why, comrade, you just go back and keep translating those fictional stories as they are published in those German magazines. The German Communist Party is the largest party outside of the Soviet Union. The German comrades know best how to transform that miserable wretch of a worker into a fighting revolutionary hero. In a few years you will see how that transformed German revolutionary worker will sweep the Krupps, the Junkers into the ash heap of history, how those German workers will plant the red banner of the successful proletarian revolution firmly in Europe for the rest of the nations to follow.”

I had no grounds to dispute the correctness of that theoretical foundation of Communist propaganda although I was of the opinion that Bebrits was far more contemptuous of the individual worker than the facts warranted. That conversation took place in the fall of 1929 and subsequent developments in Germany tended to bear out Bebrits’ words concerning the psychology of the worker. However, actual events proved different in one basic essential from Bebrits’ prophecy. Hitler and Goebbels, who took that line over from the Communists, proved greater masters in its application—they were the ones who convinced the German masses that they were the Herrenvolk whose superiority destined them to rule over all other nations—and it is now a matter of historical record that they nearly succeeded. But that was still in the future that evening. As our talk became more intimate I pressed Bebrits for the details of that railroad strike in Transylvania. He was at first reluctant but he yielded finally. As he went deeper into his story, he became more and more animated and I found myself transported back to the years of the First World War in Hungary.

The Germans under Field Marshal von Mackensen were then concentrating for an all-out assault on Rumania to knock that country completely out of the war. The hub of all railroads from Germany to Rumania was Temesv‰ár, where Bebrits held a comparatively high post for a young man then in his twenties, that of Assistant to the Station Master. The railroad workers in that town had chosen that moment to demonstrate their antiwar sentiments and went on strike, bringing all rail traffic to a halt. The German High Command responded by arresting hundreds of railway workers, threatening to shoot all of them unless they resumed work. The railway workers held out. Mass executions were about to begin when suddenly Bebrits volunteered to take a hand. He was well liked and respected by all ranks and when he approached the higher railroad officials with his plan they were happy to recommend him to the German High Command.

Bebrits offered to persuade the men to go back to work and start traffic moving under two conditions: that all death sentences be revoked and all other retaliatory measures be canceled. He also wanted permission to speak privately with the arrested men. Those requests were granted. The men returned to work and Bebrits took over.

To the delight of the military, the most feverish activity in railroading history developed instantaneously right under their own eyes. Locomotives were getting up pressure, black smoke and white steam poured from the long-dormant funnels. Engines started puffing and snorting all along the tracks. Jets of hot white steam hissed round the elbow-shaped, shiny steel driving-shafts, punctuated by short penetrating toots of railroad whistles. Trains shunted back and forth, cars were coupled and uncoupled. Bumpers clashed, transmitting a shivery impact from car to car along the length of the trains—each car came alive with a shock when it received the rude jolt and passed along the momentum, snake-like, to the next car, to the delight of the military.

The German Army Command was fascinated, that was railroading at its peak of perfection, the Christmas dream of a child come true. Semaphores flashed red, green, and yellow, their arms went up and down or halfway; brakemen signaled with their red flags by day, with the arclike movement of red lanterns by night. Every railroad man was at work, every car was in motion, the rails were hot with friction, the flashing wheels glimmered silvery by the light of the stars.

It took days before the German Military Command discovered that with all that day-and-night feverish activity not a single train got through, that every southbound train was now facing north, that military units had been broken up and separated, that guns had been divorced from their ammunition and, worse still, every crossing, every switch was blocked by a long string of cars. It was the traffic jam of the century. The harder Bebrits worked the worse the tangle became.

They called Bebrits on the carpet but they couldn’t prove their suspicions. Bebrits had been working day and night without sleep, his eyes were bloodshot and circled, he was near the point of exhaustion. He had shouted himself hoarse and he could barely whisper his rebuttal that that was the way of railroading, that all the trains were in motion, that the men had kept their pledge and were carrying out all orders faithfully. Not having any tangible proof, the military had to let Bebrits go.

It took four more days before the first train finally left for the Rumanian border. The news of that exploit spread like wildfire throughout the land, it sparked further antimilitary resistance. Bebrits was eventually jailed for sabotage but he wouldn’t tell me about that part and I did not want to press him.

That was the kind of revolutionary inspiration I had been looking for, it deepened my respect for the old-time revolutionary leaders. We discussed many topics that evening, points about Communism that bothered me, particularly dialectics and historical materialism. I questioned the accuracy of that supposedly scientific guide to the foretelling of the future development of history. My question was, what would happen to that theory after the establishment of Communism when the opposing class forces presumably disappeared

Bebrits’ eyes took on a dreamy look. He pondered the question and then replied that there would always be opposing forces. The struggle in society would then move on to a higher plane. A society then might clash over the kind of music to play, over the kind of poetry to write, whether to increase the population or to apply compulsory birth control, and so on. No society would ever be in full equilibrium, there would always be forces that clashed. But that was all in the future, something for our grandchildren to face.

From that evening on, Bebrits and I became rather close, but our relationship was soon to be interrupted. Summoned to an inquiry into Communism by the Hamilton Fish Congressional Committee in 1930, Bebrits did not evoke the Fifth Amendment but attested his faith in Communism and was subsequently ordered deported. He went to the Soviet Union where he became a trouble-shooter in the reorganization of the Soviet railways. He wrote a few times at first; then I lost track of him.

In the late fifties I came across a short feature story in an American magazine or newspaper describing a fully operating small-scale railroad with miles of tracks built by the Ministry of Transport in Communist Hungary for the amusement of children near Budapest. The children had full rights to run the locomotives, to man the switches and signals by themselves and thus become educated in the ways of railroading. Even though that article did not identify the Minister of Transport by name until the very end I guessed who he was right from the start.

It was my friend Bebrits all right.