XIV
I made one other trip to New Jersey that was to be much more momentous to me in a personal way. Albert Weisbord, a studious young trade unionist, then or later a member of the Central Committee (subsequently expelled for some special political heresy), had organized a great strike of the textile workers at Passaic. It was a long, stubborn struggle with recurrent violence. The authorities had repeatedly forbidden the strikers to demonstrate. Many of the workers were women, and they defied the ban by marching through the police, pushing their babies in carriages while the demonstration followed them.
The Daily Worker sent Harry Freeman and me to cover one of those prohibited demonstrations. We were sent only to observe and were strictly forbidden to take part in the march or the fights. We blended with the crowds along the sidewalks.
The strikers were in one of the strike halls. The doors were shut and the police were massed in force to keep them shut and to keep the strikers from marching. Inside, the strikers were evidently buzzing like swarming bees. Now and again, the doors would be thrown partly open. The police would close in and slam them shut again. At last the doors were forced wide open, apparently by the weight of massed men and women strikers behind them.
A slender girl in a brown beret rushed out before the police could stop her. The demonstration surged after her. “Get that bitch in the brown beret,” an officer shouted. Without flinching, she walked forward as the police closed in, swinging their clubs. But the demonstration poured over them and swept them back. “There,” I thought, “is a Communist.”
I was mistaken. After the demonstration, Harry Freeman and I rode back to New York by train with a little group that had taken part in the march. Opposite me sat the girl in the brown beret. With her black bobbed hair, she looked like a Russian. She was very forthright and militant. I noticed particularly that her dark brown eyes were of a candor and purity such as I had never seen in any other woman in the Communist movement.
I was told that her name was Esther Shemitz. She was not a Communist, but a pacifist. Like her friend, who sat beside her, a Southern girl named Grace Lumpkin, whom I have mentioned in the first part of this book, Esther Shemitz was on the staff of The World Tomorrow, a pacifist magazine. Like me, she had been sent to report the strike. I thought that I had seldom seen a less pacific pacifist. I did not then know that even the mention of the word blood sometimes makes her faint, but the slightest hint of injustice or cruelty enrages and makes her fearless. Neither of us could foresee that, twenty years later, under the brutal bullying of Lloyd Paul Stryker, the same force that made her walk toward the police clubs would make her cry out in the first Hiss trial: “My husband is a great man and a decent citizen.”
Esther Shemitz is my wife.
XV
The Communist lives in permanent revolt and anger against the injustice of the world around him. But he will suffer almost any degree of injustice, stupidity and personal outrage from the party that he serves. He may fuss, whimper, harangue and even intrigue. But he will not act openly against the authority of the party. For to do so would be to breach discipline. And discipline is not only, to this great secular faith, what discipline is to an army. It is also what piety is to a church. To a Communist, a deliberate breach of discipline is an act of blasphemy. Only an intolerable situation can make it possible or even imaginable.
The situation at the Daily Worker had become intolerable. Engdahl’s editorial incompetence had brought the paper close to anarchy, and his personal behavior was demoralizing the staff. Vern Smith (no doubt with factional motives in mind, too) drew up a petition to the Central Committee of the party, asking for Engdahl’s immediate removal. He proposed that all staff members sign it. Harry Freeman, Sender Garlin, John Sherman, Vern himself and I signed.
In the Communist Party, it was equivalent to mutiny on the high seas, for Engdahl had been appointed by the Central Committee. Vern Smith and one of the other signers took the petition to national headquarters on 125th Street. There was consternation. It was not entirely due to the breach of discipline. Another peculiarly Communist attitude entered in. Revolutionists have a respect, amounting to awe, for the signed document. They have broken, or are trying to break, the continuity of order in society. By that act, they repudiate tradition, and the chaos they thereby unloose also threatens them, for they can no longer count on the inertia or authority of tradition to act as a brake or a bond on chaos. Hence that fussy attention which revolutionists pay to mere legalistic forms that puzzles outsiders both in the case of the Nazis and the Communists—their meticulous regard for protocol and official papers. Hence the tiresome detail and massive fictions of their legal and constitutional procedures, and the formal pettifoggery, with all the i’s dotted, of a secret police that works entirely beyond the law. For in breaking the continuity of tradition, the revolutionist, for his own sake, must seek a cementing substitute. All he has left to fall back on, the mark of his blighting touch upon life’s tissues, are those dead papers, interminable procedures, formidable quiddities—and his incongruous regard for them.
The petition as a document frightened the party brass. Speaking, if I remember rightly, through its national chief of propaganda and agitation, Bertram D. Wolfe, the party sternly informed the insurgents that the petition was impermissible, that Engdahl must remain as editor. Secretly, in the way of politics and politicians the world over, it prepared to get rid of him as a liability.
Since he could not be kicked downstairs without reproach to his faction, the Lovestoneites, he had to be kicked upstairs. He was presently sent to fill a post where unusual intelligence, alertness, human understanding and organizational talent were required: chairman of the International Labor Defense, which had in its care all legal and human relations involving workers and Communists who have been arrested or imprisoned as a result of strikes, demonstrations or other “class war” activities.
This perpetuation of dead wood constantly presents the party with a bureaucratic problem. It solves it in part through its periodic purges. Then it savagely and inhumanly rids itself of the clogging weight, which political expediency has retained for a while, and which the party has never devised any more efficient method of casting off. Then the party arbitrarily destroys the individuals whom it arbitrarily inflated and kept afloat, usually by casting them into the darkness outside its pale, by expulsion from its ranks. For the party “housecleaning” (chiska in Russian ) is a permanent feature of Communist life. Only the Great Purge employed the “wet method”—bloodshed.
XVI
“And what do you do, com-rade?”
I glanced up from my desk to find peering over my shoulder a face that I had never seen before. It was an arresting face. I thought then that it was a good face (later on, I was to find that, in the way of human faces, it could sometimes be a troubled and a foolish face). Under a workingman’s cap, two small dark eyes, like an old bull elephant’s, twinkled on either side of a pugnacious nose. The chin was strong, the cheekbones prominent, like an Indian’s. But the face lacked height, as if the chin and scalp had been squeezed forcibly together. And the tufts of gray hair around the ears and the trace of benevolence in the eyes suggested, not a revolutionist so much as Santa Claus.
The face belonged to Robert Minor, the son of a Texas judge, who had given up a career as one of the great American cartoonists to devote his life to Communism, to neglect his great draughting talent for the sake of becoming a factional politician for which he had no talent at all, so that he was forever backing the wrong group and the wrong man, doomed to make humiliating, eleventh-hour switches and recantations, and to be the butt and pawn of little men who could comprehend neither his indivisible faith nor his ultimate profound humility.
Comrade Minor had just returned from Moscow. The Central Committee had just decided that he was to succeed Comrade Engdahl as editor of the Daily Worker. Minor was making his preliminary tour of inspection. But, as the fallen Engdahl was still sitting at his desk, Minor was treading
softly, politically and physically.
I explained to him the nature of worker correspondence. He did not interrupt me. When I had finished, he answered in his drawling voice, punctuated with odd stresses and inflections, that sometimes made it seem as if he were translating everything he said from Russian, which he spoke fluently. “Whain I was in Mos— coww,” he said, “Com-rade Boookhh-har-reen (Bukharin) sayed to me—he sayed: ‘Workers correspondence izz one of our most important act-i-vi-ties.’” Then the bearer of the oracle laid a fatherly hand on my shoulder and passed on to the next revolutionist.
Minor was scarcely out of the office before Sender Garlin, who was a superb mimic, had out a handful of filing cards and was giving the staff an imitation of Comrade Minor making a soap box oration. It ended: “Whain I wazz in Mos-coww; Com-rade Boookhh-har-reen sayed to me, sayed to me—he sayed (business of searching frantically through the notes on the filing cards) Ahl Here it is ! He sayed to me: ‘Workers of thee worald, yewnite!’”
Minor at once set about raising staff morale (by the simple method of paying wages occasionally, for one thing) and by tightening up the editorial routine. He crowded the office with new talent. Fred Ellis (who all but reverenced Minor as a cartoonist, but deplored him as a politician) used to describe his new editor as standing on the Bowery, gathering in the air with welcoming arms while he called to the floaters: “Come een! Come een! There are jobs for e-ver-y-bo-dy.”
Minor’s first elementary reform was to set up a copy desk to originate stories and control the flow of copy. At its head, he first placed Sterling Bowen, a pale, horse-faced recruit with sad eyes, who had worked with one of the Detroit newspapers and was then on the Wall Street Journal. Bowen had been an I.W.W. and wrote poetry in his off-hours.
Like the other professionals, he soon vanished. He was presently replaced by another veteran newsman and a Communist—C. Marion Hatch. Comrade Hatch was a thin, sharp-featured man, with popping, reddish-brown hare’s eyes, and a face that grew turkey red when he was having tantrums. He had them often as a matter of editorial procedure. He had been an editor of one of the Vanderbilt tabloids in Florida. He at once set about keeping elaborate copy and work charts and turning the central organ of the American Communist Party into a tabloid. As he was short on Communist experience and theory and long on city-desk techniques, he soon found himself faced by a stolid, revolutionary opposition. Hence his tantrums. The comrades resented his lack of ideology, but they resented even more his efficiency, and he was undeniably efficient. Patiently, they waited for his downfall. It came in the form of a baby.
The Daily Worker, as befitted the mouthpiece of the world revolution, was a densely solemn sheet, because that was exactly how the comrades wanted it. Hatch dreamed of “brightening it up,” of introducing “human interest.” Somehow, the staff editors usually managed to defeat him. But late one night, when most of his colleagues had gone home, Hatch ordered the front page of the Worker to be torn out. He inserted a news photo that had come in from one of the picture services, and sent the paper to press.
In the morning, when the “general staff of the world revolution” opened its central organ, a baby, a naked little foundling, lying on its stomach, stared . cheerfully at them from the front page. A shudder of horror passed through the party. “A baby!” said Comrade Fowler in the same tone in which he had snarled “complication of foul diseases.” “Deliberately making us ridiculous in the eyes of the masses!” Most of the Daily Worker staff merely thought the baby convulsively funny.
But the Central Committee was appalled. There was a rumble of thunder from 125th Street and a buzz of rumor about Hatch’s summary dismissal. Minor blocked that. But the dictatorship of the city desk was broken, though Hatch adjusted himself very neatly to the change and still managed to force a minimum of efficiency on some of the least efficient men on earth. For he discovered that he had allies in Freeman, Garlin, Honig and Chambers. At that point, the younger men began to emerge and presently to manage the Daily Worker.
Hatch was not only a better newsman than any of us. He was to that degree a better revolutionist. The value of babies to the class war would soon be recognized wherever the Communist press had a mass circulation.
XVII
I managed to be an active Communist for several years without ever attending a unit meeting. About the time that I went to the Daily Worker, the old organization of the Communist Party in branches, which had been borrowed from the Socialist Party, was abolished. The party was “Bolshevized,” as it was called. It was reorganized in smaller units, beginning with what is now called a cell, but was then awkwardly called a “nucleus.” There were street nuclei and factory nuclei. The street nuclei comprised the Communists living in a small city area. The factory nuclei included the Communists in one shop. In those days, there were many street nuclei and, except in the needle trades, very few factory nuclei.
I was assigned to a street nucleus. But the confusion that resulted from the wholesale organizational change was wonderful to behold, and in the confusion the party lost track of a number of people, including me. Everyone assumed that I was in some unit, but nobody troubled to ask which one. Since most party meetings are at night, my night hours on the Daily Worker soon made party meetings practically impossible anyway. I am so made that I dislike any meeting. Party meetings, dull, quarrelsome and interminable, were unbearable. Still I would have borne them but for something else. It was impossible to attend party meetings and not be drawn into the factional struggle. This I was determined should not happen to me. So I dropped out of that dreary side of party life, which is almost a complete blank to me.
The party was then divided into two “caucuses”—Lovestoneite and Fosterite. But a third group had also emerged—the Trotskyists, the American followers of the former Soviet commissar for war, who, at the time I am writing about, was on the point of being expelled from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Their leaders were James Cannon, the brother-in-law of Dr. Philip Rosenbliett, a Soviet agent whom I was presently to know very well indeed, and Max Schachtman. Max Schachtman was a bright young intellectual, who, among other activities, was given to writing mischievous jingles about party leaders. It was by way of one such jingle that I first became aware of an inconspicuous member of the Central Committee whom I had never seen, and knew nothing about except that he had a good many children, but who was presently to play a brief, decisive role in my life. The jingle went:There was an old man named Bedacht,
Who had kids to the number of acht, etc.
But it was not Comrade Bedacht, whom I may have seen a dozen times without knowing who he was, who then disturbed me. Nor was it Dr. Rosenbliett whose office I must have passed, like thousands of others, not knowing that a dozen threads of international conspiracy were knotted behind its ground-glass doors. What disturbed me was the expulsion of Comrade Trotsky from the Communist Party on grounds that I believed to be unjust if not wholly fraudulent, and two aftermaths of that expulsion—the expulsion of Trotsky’s American followers and a brief cable from Moscow that came to the Daily Worker office.
I was not then and never have been a Trotskyist. Insofar as I understood the issues between Trotsky and Stalin ( and it was all but impossible to dig them out of the rich coating of recrimination and deliberate double talk with which they were caked), I was for Stalin and against Trotsky. What disturbed me deeply was the spectacle of the calculated degradation by lies and slander of the man who, after Lenin, was undeniably the Communist Party’s best brain, and one of the outstanding political minds of the age. I felt, too, that a party which could conclude a decisive debate on strategy and tactics only by physically expelling an intelligent and very big minority group, betrayed a weakness that might become fatal. It was not only the despotic action that outraged me. It was the sure sense that only from a meeting of its best minds, even in tension, could be evolved those policies which alone would enable the party to solve the immensely complicated problems of revolutionary struggle posed
by history in our age. I was sickened rather than aroused by a struggle in which I had had no part, and I kept my thoughts largely to myself. But that struggle was to touch me personally in a tiny way that I was never to forget.
The Communist International maintained a news service called Inprecorr ( International Press Correspondence ). It was published in Moscow ( and perhaps Berlin ) in several languages, including English. It reported all the weekly news of the Communist world and the proceedings, often in full, of the great Communist congresses. This service was used, practically unedited, in the Communist press all over the world. On live news, the Inprecorr also sent cables direct from Moscow to the Daily Worker and other Communist papers.
The day after the Soviet secret police seized Trotsky and packed him off to exile in Southern Siberia, one of the Inprecorr cables reached the Daily Worker. It was given to me to transcribe and write up, perhaps to test me, perhaps because no one else wanted to touch so hazardous, or so shameless, an item.
The cable was brief. It said, as nearly as I can recall: “Trotsky left Moscow today for Alma Ata with six carloads of baggage and his hunting dogs. At the railroad stations, the peasants gathered and asked: ‘What great lord is this passing through the land?’” I transcribed it almost as it was. I felt helpless and ashamed.
Witness Page 31