Clever Girl

by Lauren Kessler

  Elizabeth Bentley was not politically savvy enough to argue the fine points, but she knew what she saw, and she knew what she felt: Something was very wrong in America. Her social conscience, piqued when she was a child, nourished at Vassar, and reawakened in Mussolini’s Italy, was now aroused by the conditions around her. The Depression opened her eyes. It was for her, as it was for many of her generation, a clarifying experience, a crucible. But for Bentley, the Depression was more backdrop than direct motivation. She was neither an activist nor a joiner. In truth, it was her own condition that worried her most.

  Her future was murky, and not just because of the Depression, not just because she couldn’t find a job. It was because she had strayed from the path, because the direction she had been headed—from New Milford to Vassar to Europe to Foxcroft—was no longer the direction she was headed. The Depression made it impossible for her to resume the life she had been brought up and educated to lead. But she had strayed from that path before the Depression blocked her way. After the year in Europe, she could not have resumed her old life, even if it had been possible to do so. There was something in her, something that craved a different kind of life, a part of her that seemed more than ready to flout the values and traditions of her upbringing. There was something in her that was restless and reckless and needy.

  Chapter 4

  Circle of Friends

  ELIZABETH BENTLEY FOUND accommodations in a cheap rooming-house on the Upper West Side, just a few blocks from Columbia University where she was dutifully and unhappily enrolled in secretarial courses. In six months, she would have the skills to apply for an office job—if she could find one—a prospect she, a twenty-six-year-old Vassar grad only a term away from a master’s degree, did not relish. But it was work, and she needed to support herself. The only bright spot that fall was her growing friendship with a woman who lived down the hall.

  Lee Fuhr was a nurse taking courses at Columbia’s Teachers College. She had grown up poor and had lived a tough life, working in cotton mills to make enough money for school, weathering the death of her husband while she was pregnant with their child, and now struggling to support the both of them as she continued her education. Bentley did not make friends easily, or even try to, but it was more than she could bear, sitting alone in her shabbily furnished room thinking about her uncertain and downwardly mobile future. And there was something about Fuhr that drew her in. Her new friend had a definite goal in life and was headed toward it with a sense of purpose Bentley herself no longer felt. Fuhr was tough but not toughened. For all her bad luck and difficult circumstances, she was not embittered. She was not cynical. She would always tell Bentley that although things were bad today, the future would be different. How? Bentley would ask her as they shared a cheap, hot-plate meal together. Fuhr would just smile.

  As their friendship progressed, Bentley told Fuhr about her year in Italy under fascism, about what it was like to live in a totalitarian state with liberties curtailed and the threat of violence ever present. Bentley was afraid—many people were afraid—that America was headed in that same direction. The Depression was breeding deep unrest. There was an army of unemployed out there, hungry and angry and increasingly desperate. They were living on the streets. They were gathering in front of City Hall. They were marching on the mayor’s mansion. Homeless, jobless, hopeless, they had nothing to lose. It was not difficult to imagine that soon there would be chaos in the city and that martial law would follow. And then, Bentley told her new friend, we wouldn’t be far from what was happening in Italy. Fuhr listened with great interest. She too most emphatically saw fascism as ugly and dangerous, a threat to both individual freedom and international peace. In fact, she was a member of a relatively new group called the American League Against War and Fascism. Would Bentley like to come to the next meeting? She could find out what the organization was doing to prevent fascism from coming to the United States.

  Bentley had never heard of the League, but when Fuhr listed for her some of its more illustrious members—a roster that included Sherwood Anderson, Theodore Dreiser, Reinhold Niebuhr, and a number of other writers, religious leaders, and university professors—she was impressed. These were intelligent, thoughtful people who wrestled with big ideas in their work. If they thought enough of the league to join, then surely she should go see what it was all about.

  One night that fall, Fuhr took her to a meeting of the League chapter that had been formed by students and professors at Teachers College. Bentley was immediately taken with the energy and hope she found there. The members seemed smart and articulate, passionate about politics, somehow both clear-eyed about the present and optimistic about the future. They believed in something. They had spirit in spiritless times. She went to another meeting, and another. She felt her own discouragement ebb in the face of such enthusiasm and fervor.

  Fuhr suggested that she might get more involved by helping the league with research on Italian fascism. She could do volunteer work at the League’s Manhattan headquarters, located in a loft on lower Fourth Avenue. Bentley decided to give it a try. But when she walked up the three flights of rickety wooden stairs and into the office, with its battered furniture, bare light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, and windows so grimy you could hardly see out of them, she almost turned around and walked out. A young man spotted her. “Come on in,” he said, “and don’t mind the mess. We don’t have money to spend on fancy fronts.”

  His name was Harold Patch, one of the editors of the League’s publication, Fight. He was immediately assigned to take Bentley under his wing. He was a voluble, enthusiastic soul who, despite being a few years younger than Bentley, had a long history of political activism. He told her he had been an anarchist and a socialist and had once belonged to the American Association for the Advancement of Atheism. Bentley thought he was a curious character—shabbily dressed, with rarely enough money to buy proper food, but full of good humor and high spirits. She liked him. She liked being around the office with its oddly engaging atmosphere, simultaneously casual and intense, financially impoverished but intellectually rich. She started showing up regularly, doing whatever needed to be done. Soon she joined the League and began attending weekly chapter meetings.

  What she found in the organization was not just a group of young intellectuals who hated fascism as much as she did but also a warm and hospitable circle of friends. They were unpretentious, generous, and kind. They were easy and relaxed with one another, dropping by each other’s apartments, going to the movies together, going out for coffee. She was drawn to them, but at the same time, she couldn’t quite figure them out. They appeared to lack the usual prejudices—racial, religious, and economic. In the midst of their own poverty and the despair around them, they seemed to have found an inner sureness. They seemed to have an anchor where she had lost her moorings. She didn’t know what their secret was, how they managed to find so much to be hopeful about, but she did know that the more time she spent with her league friends, the less despondent she became. The busier she was with League activities, the more she forgot about her own problems. Bentley was alternately irritated by and envious of her new friends. She was also never happier.

  What she didn’t know was that the sense of purpose and sense of certainty she perceived in Fuhr and Patch and many of the others came not just from their commitment to antifascism. It came from their attachment to a much larger, grander, more encompassing ideology. Although many in the League were antifascist liberals deeply concerned with what was happening in Germany and Italy, those who controlled the organization were something more. They believed not just in liberal causes but in radical ideas. They believed in a classless society, in a worker-run state in which the means of production were owned by the people. They believed most fervently in the social and political experiment they saw unfolding in the Soviet Union. The league was, in fact, a communist front, an organization set up by the Communist Party to draw good liberals into the revolutionary cause. But Bentley didn’t
know this in the winter of 1935. If she had any reservation about the League at all, it was, ironically, that the organization seemed to have a very definite program against war and fascism but was rather vague about what it stood for. She was thinking seriously about politics for the first time in her life and seeing her neighbor Lee Fuhr more often these days. Invariably, their conversations turned to the economic disaster they were living through.

  “There’s no use trying to kid ourselves that conditions in this country are good,” Fuhr told her one night after they had eaten dinner together. “Our economic setup is rotten clear through…But I don’t need to tell you that. You seem to know already.”

  Bentley did know. Or thought she knew. She read the papers. She saw the beggars on the streets. She remembered vividly the victims of an earlier economic depression, the starving families in McKeesport. Now she was the one out of work. She was the one living close to the bone in a little room in a bad neighborhood.

  “But it’s not a hopeless situation,” Fuhr told her. If we can ward off fascism, she said, we may be able to evolve into a good, equitable society where everyone is guaranteed the essentials for a decent life. Bentley thought that sounded just fine, but she saw it as impractical. Greed would get in the way, she told Fuhr. As long as men were greedy, there would be social injustice. But Fuhr disagreed: Greed was not an essential part of human nature, she said, it was a by-product of the profit motive.

  “That’s the trouble with our present civilization,” she told Bentley. “People have been taught to work only to accumulate money for themselves, without regard to the welfare of their neighbor.” Why not, she asked, eliminate the profit motive? Why not produce for use and not for profit? It can work, she said. Bentley was dubious. It went against what she knew, or thought she knew, about human nature. It was a fine dream. But that’s all it was.

  But Fuhr insisted it was no dream. This is what they’re doing right now in the Soviet Union, she told her.

  Elizabeth Bentley was a woman with a social conscience. Her ancestors may have been Puritans, her family may have been rock-ribbed Republicans, but she was—the times had made her—a liberal. She wanted to believe that it was possible to build a society without greed, without poverty, without starvation, without the terrible inequities she saw around her. She listened to Lee Fuhr, and she remembered Hallie Flanagan’s enthusiasm about Russia. Maybe this kind of society was possible. Perhaps, she said to Fuhr, the League can become the center of a movement to work toward a new society.

  Fuhr said she didn’t think so. The League was too big and unwieldy. Its organization was too loose. What was needed, she told her friend, was a core group of well-trained, well-disciplined people, people with energy and vision and commitment who would be in it for the long haul.

  “But where are you going to find such a group?” Bentley asked.

  “You don’t have to find them,” Fuhr told her. “They already exist.” They’re the communists, she said, the ones who will rally around them the progressive forces and lead them to a new society. I am one of them, she told Bentley. I am a communist.

  So was, Bentley came to learn, her friend Harold Patch. So were many of the league members she most admired. And maybe, she began to think, so am I. After all, she seemed to agree with just about everything Fuhr said. Fuhr had lived a life of poverty. She had worked in the mills. She knew what she was talking about. Bentley understood now what buoyed Fuhr’s spirits, what gave meaning and direction to her life. It was her friend’s faith in communism. Bentley wanted to have faith in something.

  If you believe in equality, if you believe in full employment and an end to poverty, then you’re one of us, Fuhr told her. And if you’re one of us, you ought to join the party. Bentley felt instinctively that her friend was right. Everything she learned about the party through Fuhr made sense. The party understood the threat of fascism and stood squarely against it. In fact, Georgi Dimitrov, head of the Comintern, the directing body for communist parties worldwide, was just about to proclaim a “popular front” against fascism. With Hitler and Mussolini on the rise, and the United States and other democracies otherwise occupied struggling with the devastating effects of the Depression, it looked as if the communists were the only bulwark against fascism. That was important to Bentley, very important. Through the late-night talks with Fuhr, she was coming to believe that communism stood for what she stood for: a decent education, a decent job, a decent chance for all. Fuhr and her league friends, unlike the muddle-headed, ineffectual liberals Bentley saw around her, were people who seemed to know where they were going and seemed to know how to get there. In these dark and confusing days, the people she now knew to be communists were the ones speaking with power and moral imagination.

  But not all her thoughts that long winter were logical—or ideological. She was also caught up in a maelstrom of emotions. She was living, untethered and alone, through frightening and confusing times. She had no work to believe in, no career to which to devote herself, no family. She had long ago turned away from the Episcopal church of her childhood because she saw little connection between the well-rehearsed sermons of well-fed ministers and the tenets of Christian brotherhood her mother had taught her. So she had no religion to fall back on, no spiritual home to come home to. Maybe the party could be that home with the tenets of communism providing a scripture to live by. Communism could provide that meaning she was searching for, that something-bigger-than-herself to believe in. The emotional and psychological appeal of communism was particularly powerful for rudderless people like Elizabeth Bentley. It was an anchor for those adrift, a place of healing for the wounded, a family for the lonely, a home for the homeless. It was where an unemployed and powerless nobody could become a somebody.

  For Bentley, there was yet another attraction, although she might not have admitted it to herself. There was the risk. Joining the party would be a daring venture, like going off to Europe for a year, like taking a lover. There was an excitement to it, a kind of titillation. Lee Fuhr had asked her months ago not to tell anyone else that she was a party member. She was not ashamed, she said, but she wanted to keep her affiliation secret. Communists were really just people with well-developed social consciences, she told Bentley, but they were not in good standing in this country. People seem to think we’re bomb-toting terrorists, Fuhr said. But of course, we’re not.

  The disreputable image of communism may have appealed to Bentley’s risk-taking side, but it may also have been the reason she found herself reluctant to take the plunge. Whatever else it was, membership in the Communist Party was a long way from membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution, a long way from a girlhood in New Milford, and a long way from the manicured lawns of Foxcroft. She turned twenty-seven that January, but she felt no wiser about herself, no surer about where she was headed. Maybe I am just a hypocrite, she thought. I believe, but I don’t have the courage of my convictions. The more she waffled, the more she doubted herself.

  “I thought you said that you had a New England conscience,” Fuhr said to her one night. It was an accusation, not a statement. Bentley heard the contempt in Fuhr’s voice and was stung by it. The two had been meeting and talking for months, Fuhr full of energy, full of good words to say about the party, Elizabeth alternately enthused and hesitant. Now Fuhr was losing patience. “If you have a conscience, it ought to be bothering you pretty badly right now,” she said. Then she left Bentley’s room, slamming the door behind her.

  Fuhr had moved out of the rooming-house and taken a cheap walk-up apartment on West 124th Street just off Amsterdam Avenue. Bentley visited her there many times as she continued to struggle with whether to join the party. Sometimes Fuhr would be friendly and talkative, discussing politics and the party with equal enthusiasm. But other times, it seemed as if her friend had given up on her. Increasingly, she was testy or annoyed, or silent. Perhaps as much as Bentley felt twinges of conscience, she also felt the removal of Lee Fuhr’s friendly affection. Havin
g a close friend, having a social life, was new to Bentley, but she had gotten used to it quickly. The relationship with Fuhr had sustained her through the dispiriting winter, but now it looked as if that friendship was contingent on Bentley joining the party.

  She had many reasons to join. But ultimately, what caused her to walk over to Lee Fuhr’s apartment one gray Tuesday afternoon in March of 1935 and sign her name to the party application was simple despair. She had just returned from yet another fruitless job search and was sitting in a chair in her room, staring out at the bare trees on Riverside Drive. It was a bleak day. The calendar said spring, but there was a raw wind off the river, and the skies were iron gray. Bentley sat there, stiff-backed, feeling sorry for herself. How many times had she gone over the same thing in her head: how unhappy she was that she was living in a little rented room, how unhappy she was that she couldn’t find a teaching job, how unhappy she was that she was taking secretarial classes, how unhappy she was with her life. I am part of the “lost” Depression generation, she thought to herself. There will never be any great personal future for me. And now, on top of it all, her only friend thought she was spineless, that she didn’t have courage enough to stand up for her convictions.

  She thought of Fuhr’s apartment a few blocks away. It was warm and friendly there when the living room was full of league and party comrades. It was a hedge against despair, a reason to keep caring. Fuhr had said Bentley would never be happy until she acted on her beliefs, until she stopped talking and started doing. That day in March, that afternoon, Bentley felt keenly that her friend was right. She had to do something. She had to do something. The party was the place for her. She grabbed her hat and coat and hurried over to Fuhr’s apartment.