by Alan M Wald
A brilliant student, Hook received the Ward Medal for Logic and at graduation a Certificate of Merit in Philosophy. After obtaining his B.S. in 1923, he began teaching in the public schools. A year later he married a woman who lived a block away from the Hook family. A former social worker, she was also a loyal member of William Z. Foster’s faction in the Communist Party, occasionally performing secretarial work at party headquarters.22 Through her Hook kept in touch with internal party life. He came to know a number of members including Joseph Freeman and Mike Gold, and he assisted the party in various publishing matters under the direction of Alexander Trachtenberg.
In 1926 Hook received an M.A. in philosophy and a Ph.D. in 1927, both from Columbia. His dissertation, directed by John Dewey, was quickly published as The Metaphysics of Pragmatism (1927), and he was hired as an instructor at New York University. At the same time, his ongoing interest in communism was demonstrated by projects such as the party’s publication of his translation (with David Kvitko) of Volume 13 of Lenin’s Collected Works (1927) and a two-part essay on Lenin’s Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (published in English in 1927), which appeared in the Journal of Philosophy. In the essay he introduced another theme that would recur in his later work: the failure of contemporary Marxists to accurately represent Marxism because they misunderstood its partisan and scientific aspects. His essay prompted a series of sharp exchanges with Max Eastman, another student of Dewey specializing in Marxism, that would rage throughout the early 1930s.23
Short in stature with a high forehead, sharp features, round spectacles, and a dark mustache, Hook had extraordinary energy. Garrulous and aggressive, his speaking and writing combined relentless “logic-chopping” with a street-brawler’s willingness to jump into a fray at the slightest provocation. Determined to establish himself as the foremost expert on Marxism in the United States, he treated the doctrine with the scholarly sophistication that it deserved. He especially worked to restore its revolutionary content which had been earlier excised by social democratic scholars. In 1928 he won a Guggenheim Fellowship to study abroad, and he and his wife visited the University of Munich during the summer. That fall they settled in Berlin where he attended the lectures given by Karl Korsch, among others. When his Guggenheim award ran out in June 1928, he was granted a renewal to do research on the “Young Hegelians” at the Marx-Engels Institute. During this time Hook first became aware of the seriousness of the persecution of the Trotskyists in the Soviet Union, but he was not yet drawn to Trotsky politically.24
Upon his return to the United States, Hook was introduced to Herbert Solow by Felix Morrow. Solow was in transit from militant liberalism to Communism, and Hook assisted the process. Within a year Solow declared himself to be a full-blown professional revolutionist and even demanded that Tess Slesinger, his wife, decorate their Washington Heights apartment with red curtains. By now Solow had come to exercise a strong political influence on Elliot Cohen, who tended to follow him, albeit protestingly. They would often quarrel and make up like a husband and wife. But in a more general sense Solow was incapable of leadership, despite his enormous gift for analysis and his prosecuting attorney’s drive to expose and indict. Alvin Johnson, whp employed Solow for a short time on the Encyclopedia of Social Sciences, referred to him as “Mordecai with the uplifted finger.” But choleric and uncontrollable moods plagued Solow. Although he professed to be above jealousy, he seethed with anger at Slesinger’s flirtations and occasional infidelities. Later he would alternately curse his friend Hook as a centrist and then ask to serve as Hook’s “lieutenant” in the latter’s struggle to save the Communist Party from Stalinism. On other occasions he made embarrassingly ultraleft pronouncements such as declaring that the European working class should march on Moscow in order to save the Bolshevik revolution from corruption. At least once he mysteriously faltered and attenuated his political line in an important debate.25
In the fall of 1931, while involved in a study of the history and theory of the Communist movement, Solow decided to look up Whittaker Chambers whom he had seen only sporadically since their Columbia University days.26 This was followed by a period of collaboration with the Communist movement in connection with the student movement. For example, in April 1932, Solow published a letter in the Nation on behalf of the National Alumni Association urging support for and defense of the Communist-led National Student League delegation which had been threatened with mob violence while investigating conditions in the Kentucky coal fields. When Chambers became editor of the New Masses later that spring, he asked Solow to contribute an analysis of the student radicalization. As late as December 1933, Solow, together with Hook, organized a citywide Conference on Student Rights.27
In the summer of 1932 Solow traveled to Germany and the Soviet Union. Before returning the the United States, he visited Leon Trotsky, then in exile on the Turkish island of Prinkipo. Solow had favorably reviewed Trotsky’s The Real Situation in Russia (1928) in the New York Evening Post and no doubt had heard about the plight of the Left Opposition from Hook.28 But probably the main motivation for Solow’s visit to Prinkipo was the one that had inspired his trip to Palestine: he felt a personal need to thoroughly analyze all sides of a question from a firsthand experience.
Having been appalled by what he encountered during his visit to the Soviet Union, Solow now wanted to know even more facts about the situation. Later he would state that his entire life was affected by Trotsky’s unique forecasts of the tragic drift of world affairs, including Stalin’s malignant role. He also reminisced that he was struck by Trotsky’s literary brilliance and romantic personality, although from the onset he was skeptical of Trotsky’s program that called for a political revolution that would sweep out Stalin’s bureaucratic dictatorship while retaining nationalized property in the Soviet Union.29 However, a transcript of their conversation preserved among Trotsky’s papers reveals a somewhat hyper-revolutionary Solow trying to prove that the Communist Party had already been transformed into a social patriotic organization and urging that a Fourth International be founded as soon as possible. He also discussed with Trotsky the “group of intellectuals” he was assembling, and Trotsky recommended that he weed them out through a discussion of concrete political issues, such as those presented in recently published documents on the Chinese revolution.30
Returning to the United States in the fall of 1932, Solow contacted the leaders of the American Trotskyist movement, James P. Cannon and Max Shachtman, although this connection was not known to everyone in Solow’s circle. Hook and Meyer Schapiro later recalled that at the time Solow was eager to become a “professional revolutionary.” He insisted that Communist intellectuals must devote themselves full time to revolutionary work and leave their libraries and laboratories for a life commitment to the cause.31
Solow concentrated his efforts on winning pro-Communist intellectuals to Trotskyism by working among them and gradually raising political questions that would expose to them the ways in which the official Communist Party fell short of its Marxist principles. In such efforts, Solow influenced others besides his circle of friends from the Menorah group. He came in especially close contact with two other writers, James Rorty and Charles Rumford Walker, in the process of building the two most important organizations of revolutionary intellectuals that existed during the early 1930s: the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners and the League of Professionals. (The John Reed Clubs were oriented toward new and unknown writers from the working class, although Solow, Hook, Schapiro, and other professionals attended some meetings.)
James Hancock Rorty was born on 30 March 1890 in Middletown, New York, the son of Richard McKay Rorty and Octavia Churchill Rorty.32 His father, a political refugee from Donegal in Ireland, had fought the British and continued to maintain his Fenian associations while running a small grocery store. The son absorbed socialist and anarchist ideas quite naturally as he began to pursue a variety of journalistic and literary activities. Graduating from Tufts C
ollege in 1913, he was initiated into the advertising business in New York. He volunteered as a private in the Ambulance Service of the U.S. Army during World War I. Serving as a stretcher-bearer on the Argonne front, he earned the Distinguished Service Cross, but the experience turned him into a militant pacifist.
A short, trim man with delicate features and a gentle personality, Rorty moved to San Francisco after his World War II service to begin dual careers as an advertising executive and an experimental poet. He wrote in a free verse style that occasionally recalled Whitman and at times approached the quality of Carl Sandburg and Edgar Lee Masters. Usually his poems were topical. He attempted to communicate to a wide audience his response to the social and cultural forces threatening his survival and development. In 1922 he won the Nation poetry prize for “When We Dead Awaken,” and two years later he issued a small volume of poetry called What Michael Said to the Census Taker (1924).
In 1925 he left California and later in the year joined the staff of the New Masses, which was then close to but not yet controlled by the Communist Party. Somewhat of an eclectic anarchist, Rorty actually felt closer to the Socialist Party. He earned $50 a week and collaborated with fellow editors Egmont Arens, Joseph Freeman (who had received a $27,000 grant for the publication from the Garland Fund), Hugo Gellert, Mike Gold, and John Sloan. But a bitter controversy erupted on the editorial board after Rorty had arranged for the publication of Robinson Jeffers’s “Apology for Bad Dreams.” Several of the editors regarded the work as reactionary, and Rorty was soon back in advertising at three times his New Masses salary. In 1926 he published a second volume of poetry, Children of the Sun, and the following year was arrested in Boston for participating in a protest against the impending execution of Sacco and Vanzetti. In 1928 he was divorced from his first wife, Mary Lambin, and married Winifred Rauschenbusch, daughter of Walter Rauschenbusch, a well-known Christian socialist. A son, Richard, was born in October 1931, the year that Rorty decided to make a second attempt at collaborating with the Communist Party.
Charles Rumford Walker was born on 31 July 1893 in Concord, New Hampshire, the scion of the Congregationalist minister who had originally settled the region.33 On his mother’s side he was connected with the Wentworths, from whose family came the last royal governor of the colony. His father was a kindly physician who had the habit of not collecting bills from his patients. Charles had an unusually happy childhood in which his two main interests were literature and technology. From an early age he aspired to be a writer and was fascinated by languages, excelling in Greek in high school, but he also achieved local notoriety for his construction of miniature passenger balloons. Eventually he combined the two preoccupations by establishing a printing press and a local newspaper, the Daily Messenger. He set his own type and his equipment occupied the entire third floor of the family’s red brick house, which shook threateningly whenever the paper went to press. The Daily Messenger had such a large following that Charles kept it going from afar after he left Concord to attend preparatory school at Exeter.
At Yale, from which he graduated in 1916, he was editor of the Yale Literary Magazine and began a lifelong friendship with Edmund Wilson, his counterpart at Princeton. His other college friends included Archibald MacLeish, Phelps Putnam, Stephen Vincent Benét, and Thornton Wilder. With the advent of World War I, Walker was caught up in the patriotic fervor. He enlisted and went first to the Plattsburgh training camp and then to the regular army where he was assigned to the artillery, but he fell ill during transit across the Atlantic and was hospitalized until after the armistice had been signed.
Walker had never thought of himself as a radical, but, coming out of the army, he felt as if his life had been turned upside down. Consequently, he pledged himself to learn about the real nature of the society in which he lived, beginning with the steel industry, since steel seemed basic to American life. Nearly six feet tall with very blond hair, fair skin, and piercing blue eyes, Walker was healthy, strong, and adventurous. He hopped a train to Pittsburgh where he had heard that Jones and Laughlin was hiring. For a while he worked as a third helper on an open hearth and then in the brass mills. He had originally intended to use his firsthand experience to assist him in making a career in American industry, but a political turning point came during the depression of 1921 when he took a job in the personnel office of a firm in the copper industry. He found that he was unable to represent company interests to the families of laid-off workers, so he quit and went to New York to seek employment with labor reform organizations.
In 1922, he published Steel, the Diary of a Furnace Worker, and, after a stint as an assistant editor at the Atlantic Monthly in Boston, he traveled abroad to write Bread and Fire (1927), a novel about his experiences in Pittsburgh and among the reform organizations in New York. Back in Boston in 1928, he met and married Adelaide George, a Wyoming-born actress and member of the Boston Repertory Stock Company. Following the marriage his political interests temporarily flagged, so he began a book of short stories published as Our Gods Are Not Born (1930) and set about raising a family. By the spring of 1931 Walker was so far removed from politics that he decided to pursue his childhood fascination with travel balloons by wangling an assignment from Colliers to go on a thirty-day balloon trip. Upon his return, he discovered that Adelaide was doing volunteer work for the Communist-led Unemployed Council, and that autumn they went together to Kentucky to work for the Dreiser Committee of the National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners (NCDPP).
THE NATIONAL COMMITTEE FOR THE DEFENSE OF POLITICAL PRISONERS (NCDPP) AND THE LEAGUE OF PROFESSIONALS
The National Committee for the Defense of Political Prisoners was founded in June 1931 by intellectuals, writers, and artists as an adjunct to the International Labor Defense (ILD), led by the Communist Party. According to Malcolm Cowley, it originated at a meeting held that spring at the apartment of Theodore Dreiser who declared that “the time is ripe for American intellectuals to render some service to the American worker.” Actually, Dreiser had been collaborating rather closely with Joe Pass, a Communist Party organizer, and through their joint efforts the NCDPP came into existence.34 According to an announcement in the New Masses, the organization aimed to respond to racist, industrial, and political persecutions. Theodore Dreiser was the chairman, Lincoln Steffens the treasurer; among others mentioned as endorsers were John Dos Passos, Suzanne La Follette, Franz Boas, Floyd Dell, Waldo Frank, and Josephine Herbst.35 But Elliot Cohen and other former Menorah Journal writers and their friends quickly became the main administrators of the NCDPP. Cohen became executive secretary with Adelaide Walker as his assistant, and Diana Rubin, an aspiring singer who had married Lionel Trilling in 1929, worked in the NCDPP office as secretary of the Prisoners’ Relief Committee.36 The NCDPP sponsored two now-famous tours of writers to investigate conditions in Harlan County, Kentucky. The Walkers organized the second, but could not go themselves because they were still under indictment for “criminal syndicalism” for their participation on the first tour. The NCDPP was also active in the Scottsboro and Angelo Herndon defense cases and published several pamphlets including Kentucky Miners Speak (1931) and Cohen’s The Yellow Dog Contract (1932).37
Cohen himself had begun to develop a bit of a following on the Columbia University campus at this time. Among his circle was Davis Herron, son of George D. Herron, the famed Social Gospel minister and professor of Applied Christianity at Grinnell College. Davis Herron was born and raised in Florence, coming to the United States to attend Columbia. There he befriended Cohen’s younger brother, Mandel, and Rob Hall, a friend of the Cohen family from Alabama who later became a Communist official. Also in the circle was Meyer (“Abe”) Girschick, a mathematician already close to Trotskyism while en route to a position as a statistician in the Department of Agriculture. Cohen’s coterie, some of whom had attended Columbia classes given by Corliss Lamont and who had also been activists in the Communist-led National Student League, held meetings at his house. I
t was there that Herron encountered Cohen’s sister, Elsa-Ruth, home on vacation from Radcliffe. In 1933 Davis visited the Soviet Union with Girschick, and on his return trip to the United States he met with Trotsky in Prinkipo, where he proposed that a magazine sympathetic to the Left Opposition be initiated in the United States.38 The following year he and Elsa-Ruth were married.
In the spring of 1932 Cohen decided to organize a protest of lintellectuals against President Hoover’s brutal treatment of the Bonus March veterans in Washington, D.C. He asked Rorty to stop by the NCDPP office in the same building that housed the International Labor Defense offices at the corner of Broadway and ioth Street. Rorty was at once struck by Cohen’s appearance: “[T]he heavy melancholy of the long Greco-like facial mask . . . the suffering that looked out of his brilliant brown eyes. His hair was black and his face unlined. Yet he looked already like a biblical patriarch, prematurely aged.”39 Cohen frankly told Rorty that the NCDPP was a Communist front but one that defended non-Communist victims. He convinced Rorty to join Waldo Frank and Sherwood Anderson in what turned out to be an aborted attempt to meet with President Hoover.40 Shortly after, Cohen contacted Rorty again and this time proposed that Rorty become secretary of a “League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford,” the Communist presidential and vice-presidential candidates. Soon Rorty was ensconced in an office in the same building on East 13 th Street that housed the Communist Party, with Helen Schneider, wife of the Communist poet Isidor Schneider, as his secretary.