Home was a very shabby building somewhere west of the Pennsylvania Station. It was a walk up through an unlighted hall to the top floor. The room itself was a monk’s room. It was clean but almost completely bare. There was no rug on the floor. There were a table, two chairs, a bed. There was little or no heat. A monk’s room—that is to say, in the 20th century, a Communist’s room.
He did not offer me tea or coffee, which, in the case of a European Communist, means that there was none to offer. We sat down. “Now,” he said, “we will discuss the organization and function of the Communist Party.” He spoke quietly, in the carefully spaced and articulated German that many Hungarian Communists speak. He seldom paused, laying out his thoughts like a man turning the pages of a book. Sometimes, in summing up, he closed his eyes, as if that way he could better see the order of the propositions on the page. Much of what he taught me I would later find in Lenin’s What Is To Be Done—the meaning of the professional revolutionist, the tasks, the discipline and duties of that modem secular secret order which has dedicated its life and its death to initiating a new phase of history for mankind.
I visited the room more than once. Sometimes my comrade returned to the subject of the Hungarian Revolution. For part of the reasons for the downfall of the Hungarian Soviet, he was inclined to credit the American Relief Administrator, Herbert Hoover, whom he blamed for withholding food from the Hungarians. Years later, on the occasion of the opening of the Hoover Library of War and Revolution at Palo Alto, I was to interview the former head of the American Relief Administration for Time magazine. While Herbert Hoover talked to me, I had the curious sensation of hearing the story that my Hungarian friend had told me run off in reverse. Hoover told me how, when the Soviet collapsed, he had rushed his food trucks up to the ministries and filled them with the invaluable archives that now rest in Palo Alto. It was the same story from the other side of two embattled lines between which there could be no communication or sympathy, between which I was by chance a human link.
Our conversations were less like conversations than instruction in the religious sense. There was an urgency behind my comrade’s deliberate way of speaking. I felt that he had come upon me wholly unexpectedly, that he he was patiently sowing seeds, not knowing whether any would take root, but believing that they might.
One night he told me that we would not meet again, that he was going away. As we shook hands, he glanced at me shyly. “I am the representative of the West European Secretariat of the Communist International,” he said. He never told me his name and I never saw him again.
This chance meeting was of the utmost importance to me as a Communist. It came at a critical moment when, despite my daily obeisance to the historical purpose of the party and my daily apologies for its inevitably low level, its human paltriness, alternating with spurts of low comedy, was becoming too much for me. Above all, I had to fight the sense that I was absolutely alone. In the Communist Party I found at first no one else remotely like me. I believed that my vision of the Communist was the right one, but when a man finds himself completely alone, he must always question if he can be right.
What my Hungarian comrade said to me, more impressively than any words he spoke, was that my vision of the Communists was not mistaken. He embodied it. He was it. He was a man simple but sinuous, warm but disciplined, ascetic but friendly, highly intelligent but completely unpretentious. He was a man with whom I could communicate with instant ease and understanding. Therefore, there were others. I was not alone. I had only to stand in my place, to be what I believed in being, and one day I would find that others were beside me. The example of the Hungarian representative kept me going as a Communist at the moment when I was first faltering, and the experience was reinforced by the fact that it coincided with the beginning of my brother’s disaster. No contrast could have been greater.
VIII
In the Communist movement, I met two other intellectuals who were several cuts above the members of the Nearing study group. One of them was Sender Garlin, the nervous, red-headed young man who had arranged my first contact with the Communist Party. He was not yet a member of the Communist Party, though he soon became one. At that time he was working as a reporter for the Bronx Home News. He introduced me to someone of much greater specific gravity than himself—Harry Freeman, the younger brother of Joseph Freeman, the writer.
I recently opened a copy of the Saturday Evening Post to a photograph that ran across the top of one page. It was a picture of a banquet for Vyacheslav Molotov. Beside the Soviet Foreign Minister, and turned toward him deferentially in conversation, was my old comrade, Harry Freeman. He was sleeker than he had been twenty-five years before, but, except for the fact that he wore a formal black tie, not otherwise much changed. He is now, and has been, in effect or in fact, for many years, the assistant chief in the United States of Tass, the Soviet Government’s official news service.
When I first knew him, Harry Freeman was just out of Cornell University, where he had brilliantly majored in history. He was a very middle-class intellectual, extremely youthful-looking, but quietly self-assured and perfectly confident of himself. His face was slightly Mongoloid and suggested some of the pictures of Lenin as a youth. He spoke in a thin, whiny voice, but through that curiously inadequate voice functioned the best mind that I was to meet among the American Communist intellectuals. It was an entirely new type of mind to me. No matter how favorable his opinion had been to an individual or his political role, if that person fell from grace in the Communist Party, Harry Freeman changed his opinion about him instantly. That was not strange; that was a commonplace of Communist behavior. What was strange was that Harry seemed to change without any effort or embarrassment. There seemed to vanish from his mind any recollection that he had ever held any opinion other than the approved one. If you taxed him with his former views, he would show surprise, and that surprise would be authentic. He would then demonstrate to you, in a series of mental acrobatics so flexible that the shifts were all but untraceable, that he had never thought anything else. More adroitly and more completely than any other Communist I knew, Harry Freeman possessed the conviction that the party line is always right.
He had been an ardent admirer of Trotsky. “The three greatest minds of our times,” he said to me more than once, “are Freud, Einstein and Trotsky.” But the moment Trotsky fell from power, Harry Freeman became a Stalinist overnight, and so completely a Stalinist that he was outraged that I should suggest that he had ever been anything else. I dwell on this because he was a faultless example of the Stalinist mind—instantly manipulable, pragmatic, motivated by the instinctive knowledge that political position (contingent in the Communist Party on unfailingly correct official views) is indispensable to political power. And that power he desired, not for itself, but for revolutionary ends, for without political power, nothing can be achieved in history—certainly not a revolution. In personal relations, Harry Freeman was an extremely kind and even sensitive man. But his sensitivity never got in the way of his realism.
I remember that one day, when we were both working at the Daily Worker office on First Street, we walked up the Bowery together at noon. We were going to have lunch with Ruth Stout, the sister of Rex Stout, the detective story writer of Nero Wolfe fame. It was bitter cold and the wretched Bowery floaters, most of them without overcoats, were trying to find shelter in doorways or warmth beside pathetic fires. A shivering derelict came up to us and asked for a handout. Harry glanced past him, which was the proper Communist attitude. Communists hold that to give alms is to dull the revolutionary spirit of the masses, but I could never get out of my mind the fifty-cent piece that Jules Radon had left on my bed in New Orleans. I gave the wretched man what change I had in my pocket. He seized my hand and kissed it. The gesture was so shocking that I could not control my feelings. Harry drew me away. “You must not think about them,” he said, very gently, for he, too, was deeply moved. “We can’t save them. They are lost. We can only save our generation,
perhaps, and the children.” There spoke the Communist, and, from the Communist position, he was right and I was wrong.
I am convinced that Harry Freeman in his black tie, sitting next to Molotov behind the silver and the linen, still believes that he is saving the children. But his mind tells him that the way to save them is to exercise a certain kind of political power, and to have that power to exercise as a revolutionist, it is necessary to be adept in making instant adjustments to the official party line. Which is more important: the power or the adjustment? As a realist, Freeman would answer: the power.
That is the mind of the Communist bureaucrat. It is a kind of mind that, even as a Communist, I found alien to me. But it is a mind that I think I understand, and that I think most of its opponents do not understand, for they suppose that it is greedy only for power, and not the revolutionary ends which that power has in view. In that lies the danger of underestimating the force of faith that moves the enemy, and a failure also to grasp to what a degree the revolution has grown up and history has transformed the techniques of struggle. There are no more barricades. Communist power today rides in tank armies and conspires in black ties to overthrow its enemies. But the Stalinist has changed only his tie, not his mind.
IX
Harry Freeman kept urging me to write for the Daily Worker. He had joined its staff as soon as he joined the Communist Party. One day I went up with him to the crowded office on First Street; Harry introduced me as a likely volunteer writer (in those days about half of all the work done in the Communist Party was done by unpaid volunteers). Actually, I had never written a news story, had never thought about the problem and was as baffled by it as I would now feel if faced with assembling a hay baler.
Harvey O‘Connor was then the effective editor of the Daily Worker. He was a former correspondent of the Federated Press, a labor news service that the Communist Party kept in one of its many pockets. Later, he was the author of Mellon’s Millions, an unsympathetic account of Calvin Coolidge’s secretary of the Treasury and the donor of the National Gallery. O’Connor was the first of several professional newsmen, Communists or sympathizers, who were drafted to make the unreadable Daily Worker, if not readable (Communist jargon made that practically impossible), at least more intelligible. After a brief, convulsive struggle, most of the pros threw up their hands and fled. O’Connor was not, I believe, ,a Communist.
He handed me a clipping from the New York Times and told me to write a snappy lead and “class-angle” the story. The story was about the activities of one General Sandino, a Nicaraguan officer, who had sharked up a parcel of bandits (known to the Daily Worker as “the anti-imperialist forces”) and had taken to the hills, where he was standing off the national constabulary supported by the United States Marines. (The marines were presently to be recalled amidst pangs of “imperialist” bad conscience.) “Class-angling” meant to give the news a Communist interpretation. I felt quite equal to that, but, though I have written hundreds of them since, a snappy lead then seemed to me a feat beyond my powers.
I assume that I succeeded, for I was asked to write more and more for the Worker, still on an unpaid voluntary basis. I know now that I could scarcely have failed. No ability was needed on the Daily Worker. All that was needed was a dim notion of Communist theory and the audacity to face a typewriter. What resulted was then “edited”—a mysterious process for which nobody seemed responsible, least of all the nominal editor. It was quite a test of revolutionary devotion to read the Daily Worker.
With my brother’s death, I stopped writing for the Worker. I stopped all party activities. I seldom saw my comrades. Once in a long while I met Harry Freeman. He was tactful; he gently raised the problem to the plane of reason. He was organically incapable of grasping it in any other way. He pointed out the illogicality of my brother’s act, which he regarded as a purely individualist and negative solution to a struggle that demanded that men live for it, and die only when they had to. He pointed out the greater illogicality of my grief, which it was unseemly not to master, since, as a Communist, I should understand clearly the forces that caused such disasters as my brother’s, and what to do about them.
I did not then know that reason and logic can be a blasphemy. Freeman’s calm exasperated me. But, as my grief shrank, in hardening, into a core of unchanging anger, I decided to go back to the Daily Worker, as the most obvious thing I could see to do. Now I went as a full-time writer and was paid a starting salary of ten dollars a week, when I got it. Often nobody received any wages, for the Worker was always on the brink of bankruptcy.
X
The Daily Worker office was a long, narrow room with only two windows at the front. Desks were set end to end against the two long walls. There was so little space that the writers, facing the opposite walls, sat so close that the backs of their chairs almost touched. I have seldom seen an orderly editorial office, though I have known newsmen with a talent for dissembling disorder by filing it in their desk drawers, bookcases or against the wall. The Daily Worker writers disdained subterfuge. Each desk was a triumph of chaos. Editorial and human relations were much the same.
Harvey O’Connor had left some time before my return. No one was responsible for the orderly routing and flow of copy, and it sometimes happened that two or three writers were discovered to have written the same story. The paper’s nominal editor was J. Louis Engdahl, a Communist in his late forties or fifties, who seldom paid any attention to what was going on, for, at the time, he was a prey to both political and emotional stresses of great intensity. He sat at the front of the office, at one of the two windows, usually staring fixedly out. At long intervals, he would beat out a page or two of copy, which was dull but at least intelligible. Engdahl himself was not. If you asked him a simple question, he would turn away and stare out the window. When you had about decided that he had forgotten you, he would turn around and fix you with his big round lenses that magnified his eyes to a slightly mad expression. Then he would grunt. Sometimes he mumbled a few words, scarcely audible. I do not remember hearing him utter five coherent sentences.
In his prime, he had been a Socialist in Wisconsin. He was now a follower of Jay Lovestone and had received the editorship of the Daily Worker as a prize in some factional deal. He felt that he was slipping. He also lived in terror of the telephone, for that seemed to be his wife’s preferred way of reaching him, and he did not wish to be reached. When it rang, he would stare at it gloomily, then have someone else answer it. We always knew who was calling when we heard: “Comrade Engdahl is out of the office. No, I don’t think he will be back.”
Behind Editor Engdahl, at the other window, sat Comrade Vern Smith. Comrade Smith was a tall, folded-over man with a shock of white hair, startling because he had a youngish face that at first glance looked fatuous. It was only on closer inspection and closer acquaintance that you perceived that the face was also wary and shrewd, and that behind the averted blue eyes there was a wry humor. Vern seldom looked directly at anyone. He seldom glanced up from his typewriter. But now and again, without preface, he would suddenly read out a bit of news that struck him as funny, winding up with a wild chuckle. He was a prodigious producer of yard-long copy, a talent that was prized, for one of the horrors of make-up was that there would not be enough copy to fill the paper. His copy had a special merit, too. If by chance, there was too much copy, his could be cut at almost any point, and in almost any amount, without at all changing the sense, which was always in the first and last paragraphs.
Vern Smith was a stalwart of the Foster persuasion, a Westerner, who had once been a Wobbly. For some time, he edited the I.W.W. central organ, Solidarity. But his great friend, Harrison George, whom I shall presently come to, boasted one day at a labor congress in Moscow that the Communist Party was so successfully “boring from within” the I.W.W. that even the editor of Solidarity was secretly a Communist. The news shot back across the ocean and the enraged Wobblies promptly tossed out Brother Smith, who thereupon reappeared as Com
rade Smith of the Daily Worker. Once Vern made some passing reference to his white hair and I asked him how he came by it. “Trucking dynamite across the Rocky Mountains in a broken-down Ford,” he said dryly, and said no more.
I always suspected that Vern was a knife thrower of parts, but it was not until 1929 that I really saw him at work, gleefully expediting the purge of the Lovestoneites. In the 40’s, he was purged himself for “incurable Browderism,” and is now outside the official Communist Party.
Next to Vern Smith sat a woman comrade whom I shall call Angelica Ratoff. Comrade Ratoff was a good-looking woman in her upper thirties, very generously constructed, with graying hair and rather sultry brown eyes—something of a Carthaginian beauty. She was a rather sullen Bolshevik (women comrades are often more self-consciously ferocious than the men). But I noticed that she reacted in a very womanly way whenever Harry Freeman stroked her hair, called her “Angelica, darling,” and asked a favor.
I cannot remember what Comrade Ratoff was supposed to do on the Daily Worker, though I remember that she was always shuffling papers. But, in any case, her presence there had less to do with the world revolution than with Comrade Engdahl.
Behind Comrade Angelica sat Comrade Tom O‘Flaherty. He was a big, unhappy Irishman, who lived sadly in the shadow of his celebrated brother, Liam, the author of The Informer and The Assassin. He drank heavily, and I have sometimes seen him lying, stiff and foul, in front of the Workers Center on Union Square. He was bad publicity. So he would be roughly lugged inside, amidst taunts and remarks of disgust, by men who were not worthy to touch him. For Tom O’Flaherty was a man of some gifts and a brisk sense of humor (always a heavy cross for a Communist). Secretly, he hated the bad journalism, the low gossip, base intrigues, the foolish and fetid factionalism around him. Secretly, and sometimes openly, he would gibe at them. The American party was aping the Russian style of abbreviating organizational names (the world had not yet been conditioned to alphabet soup). I once heard O’Flaherty solemnly propose to the humorless Engdahl that henceforth the Daily Worker should refer to the United Councils of Working Class Housewives as the Uncopwokwifs.
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