That evening, Elizabeth Turrill Bentley joined the Communist Party of the United States of America. She used the name Elizabeth Sherman. It was, she told Fuhr, to honor her colonial American ancestor. Lee Fuhr held out her hand warmly.
“Welcome to our ranks, comrade,” she said.
Chapter 5
A Steeled Bolshevik
TENS OF THOUSANDS of professionals, artists, and intellectuals joined the Communist Party along with Elizabeth Bentley during its “Popular Front” heyday. The party was never more moderate, never less revolutionary than it was in the mid-and late 1930s when it publicly and earnestly embraced FDR and the New Deal. Like many of the mainstream reformers and progressives it attracted in those Depression-haunted days, the party stood for full employment and strong unions. Like most Americans, it stood against fascism abroad and discrimination at home. Popular Front communism was a far cry from the fiery Bolshevik sentiments of the early days, when American communists issued statements like this 1919 screed: “To hell with the teachings of peaceful revolution. The bloody seizure of power by the working classes is the only possible way.”
But by the mid-1930s, communists in America espoused a progressive agenda that opened the door to alliances with liberals and progressives. In fact, the party was becoming a significant political force in a half dozen states, including New York, Wisconsin, and California. Even the news from the Soviet Union was temperate and upbeat. Stalin, wrote a party member in 1935, was directing “the building of Socialism in a manner to create a rich, colorful, many-sided cultural life among hundreds of nationalities…united in common work for a beautiful future.” Most American communists had no idea that millions had already died during Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture in the early 1930s and that millions more were dying as a result of his unending purges. What they did know was that the party said it stood for social justice for all, that the party was a bulwark against Hitler and Mussolini. Many believed that the communism was, as it was publicly proclaiming to be, “just twentieth-century Americanism.”
During the Popular Front of the late 1930s, party membership in the United States tripled, reaching an all-time high of a hundred thousand by the end of the decade. But even more startling than the increase in members was the transformation of the membership. For the first time, native-born Americans like Bentley outnumbered the foreign-born members who had been the party’s backbone. In 1919, when the Communist Party—actually two competing parties—was founded in the United States, fewer than ten percent of its thirty-four thousand members even spoke English. Most of these new communists were recent immigrants from Czarist Russia. Many of the others were the children of Eastern European Jews who had grown up poor and on the ragged fringe of American society. But now communism was, ironically, acquiring a middle-class patina. Well-educated, assimilated Americans, especially idealistic—and unemployed—young people were flocking to the party in record numbers.
Bentley attended her first communist cell meeting the same night she signed her application at Lee Fuhr’s apartment. Fuhr had scribbled an address on a slip of paper. “We meet at different comrades’ homes,” she told Bentley. “We change every week to ensure that no outsiders get in.” That Tuesday night the meeting was in a sixth-floor walk-up on West 123rd Street just off Broadway. At eight P.M. Bentley knocked on the door of the apartment. She could hear voices within, then silence. The door opened a crack. A short, stocky man stuck his head out.
“Yes?” he said, looking her over.
Bentley was nervous, almost giddy from her first brush with the clandestine. This is just like a speakeasy in the Prohibition days, she thought. It crossed her mind to answer: “Charlie sent me.” Instead, she said, “Lee told me to come here.”
The man smiled and opened the door wide. “Come on in,” he said.
The small living room was packed with more than two dozen members of Unit 1 of the Harlem section. They were perched on windowsills, sprawled on the arms of chairs, sitting cross-legged on the floor. A comrade stood up to give her his seat. She walked across the room, trying not to feel too self-conscious. There was really no reason to. Everyone was focused on the meeting. There was a lengthy discussion of world news and the presentation of earnest reports; there were debates, analyses, arguments, strategy sessions, self-criticism sessions, the airing of grievances. The meeting was four hours long, and Bentley sat through it all, transfixed. She was impressed with how organized they were, how articulate, how knowledgeable. She was even more impressed that the chairman of the group, which included Columbia professors and graduate students, was a food worker in one of the dormitory cafeterias. Past midnight, after the meeting broke up, she went out with a group of comrades to a nearby diner where they smoked cigarettes, drank coffee, and talked politics for hours. She was exhausted and exhilarated. Will I ever have their energy? she wondered. Will I ever be able to live up to their standards?
At another meeting a few weeks later, an eight-hour marathon that lasted until four A.M., she listened as member after member criticized a certain comrade Land, one of the old standbys in the party. He was not shouldering his fair burden. He was difficult to work with. He was accused of calling one organizer an “idiot” and another a “numbskull.” That night no one had anything good to say about him. Bentley watched as the man sank deeper and deeper into his chair, eyes downcast, shamed by his comrades. The unit voted unanimously to expel him. But then the chairman stood up and said that Land should be given a chance to rehabilitate himself. Another vote was taken. It was, again, unanimous. Land would get a second chance. Bentley was struck by this whole episode. She was impressed with the application of party discipline. These people were serious about themselves and their work. She marveled at the detachment of the criticism. There was no yelling, no name-calling, no rancor. And then, when the chairman said Land ought to have a second chance…wasn’t that the epitome of compassion? Didn’t it show how much the party cared about its members? She was more convinced than ever that this was the place for her.
Almost overnight, she went from attending one meeting a week to four. There were lunches at the Columbia cafeteria, unit meetings, unit bureau meetings, weekly parties for fund-raising and recruiting. She started taking an active role in her unit, serving variously as financial secretary, educational director, organizer, and agitprop officer. As financial secretary, she collected party dues, kept the books for the unit, and went to an extra meeting a week. As the agitprop officer, she spent her evenings poring over stacks of party literature—pamphlets, brochures, special reports—reading the Daily Worker, front to back, every day, and preparing summaries for the unit. That position also meant another meeting each week. And she participated in what were considered the “usual activities”: walking picket lines, helping out during strikes, carrying banners in parades, attending protests and demonstrations where she linked arms with comrades and sang “The Internationale.”
She was told that she must “study incessantly” and “had a long way to go.” She was sure that was true. I can’t very well be a communist without knowing in detail just what it stands for, she told herself. So, soon after joining the party, she began taking courses in Marxist political economy and the philosophy of communist theory at the Communist Workers School, located in the same down-at-the-heels building on East 13th Street that housed the party’s national and district offices and its official bookstore. She signed up for her first class under an alias, which was standard practice in the party. Cloaked identities, secret meeting places, coded phone messages, special knocks—they were all a part of this new world. Bentley was late to class that first evening. Attendance had already been taken, and the teacher had begun to talk when she tiptoed into the room and found a vacant seat in the front row. The teacher paused, scanned his class list, and looked down at her.
“What’s your name, Comrade?” he asked.
She hesitated. She was nervous and rattled, and couldn’t remember the alias she had used. “I don’t
know, Comrade Professor,” she stammered.
The classroom erupted in laughter. It was an absurd remark, but they all knew exactly what she meant. They were all new to this clandestine life.
Bentley was impressed with the school. The teachers were friendly and helpful. They didn’t lecture at you; they led spirited discussions. The students were eager and enthusiastic. Most worked hard all day, but they still filled the classroom with energy and passion in the evening. By the end of the first course, she felt she understood history better than she ever had before, and she had no doubt that the Marxist-Leninist interpretation was correct.
Although she had labored over her decision to join the party for months, once she took the plunge, she dove deep. Lenin had written that men and women must devote “not merely their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives” to the cause. And that’s what Elizabeth Bentley was beginning to do. The new world she found herself in was bracing, and all-embracing. Life was full, a whirl of activity, an almost feverish busyness. It was a heady change, this transformation from the futility of searching for a job to the utility of making plans to save the world, from inertia to action, from loneliness to instant camaraderie. There was no time to doubt. There was no time to feel sorry for herself. There was, however, time to enjoy the forbidden fruits of radicalism.
Drinking, profane talk, and “loose morals” were seen as positive steps toward breaking the bourgeois code of behavior, making for a social life simultaneously salacious and politically correct. Bentley soon discovered that she no longer had to escape to Europe to live a sexually liberated life. She had an affair with a Greek worker who was a comrade in her unit. She had an affair with an Iraqi student at Columbia. Over the course of several months, she offered accommodations to fifteen or twenty men, all good communists who needed a place to sleep for the night. Some of them undoubtedly shared her bed. Later, when there was reason to find fault with her, one fellow traveler sniped that Bentley had “launched herself into party life with a zeal for the horizontal.” There were rumors that she had an abortion, perhaps more than one, aided by her friend, nurse Lee Fuhr. Whatever happened, she felt both free and secure. The party answered her questions. The party took away her despair. The party gave her permission to be “bad” and feel good about it. There was an all-in-oneness to party life, a completeness, a lulling insularity. This was, she thought, the very best time of her life.
She was also coming to see her Columbia comrades not merely as intelligent, interesting people with lofty goals but as modern-day Good Samaritans, as self-sacrificing humanitarians who were putting into practice the old Christian ideals on which she was raised. She met a Union Theological Seminary student who was applying for party membership, and he told her that Christianity was dead. Christ came to earth to preach the brotherhood of man, but men are too busy making money to listen anymore, he said. “I am convinced,” he told her, “that communism is the Christianity of the future.” The more she thought about it, the more it made sense. Christianity had arisen as the advocate of the poor and oppressed. But now it had degenerated into a pastime of the wealthy. Communism could—and should—take its place.
Still, it was not easy to convert oneself from a strong individualist to a good communist, and Bentley struggled with that. She was an educated woman who had always harbored her own strong opinions. She considered herself thoughtful, reasonable—and independent. She was proud of her free-thinking Revolutionary War ancestors. But a good communist had to believe, not question. A good communist had to stay in step. A good communist had to sacrifice individual rights for the good of the whole. It was not so much belief in the ideology—that came relatively easily to her as she read the Daily Worker and sat in classes at the Communist Workers School—but rather the mind-set, the notion that she must trust the party above herself, that she must give herself up to the party. Still, as she became immersed in a whirlwind of party activity, inundated with communist literature, and increasingly insulated from ideas and people outside the party, Bentley’s convictions grew stronger. If discipline and order and obedience were necessary to build a new society, if free thinking got in the way of the ultimate goal, then she would toe the line. She would become a communist in spirit as well as in name.
Bentley had been looking for a job, at first a teaching job, then a secretarial job, then any kind of job, since she returned from Europe. Finally, after almost nine months, something came through in the spring of 1935. Just a few weeks after she joined the party, the Columbia University Placement Center found her a position as an investigator with New York City’s Emergency Home Relief Bureau, a welfare agency established to give aid to some of the city’s neediest. She would work out of the Bureau’s Harlem office at 150th Street and Amsterdam Avenue, spending her days visiting indigent clients in the neighborhood and determining their needs. It was a physically and emotionally draining job, much like her mother’s dispiriting volunteer work in McKeesport, but on a larger and sadder scale. Every day she would walk endless blocks and climb long flights of stairs to the top floors of crumbling, fire-trap buildings. Every day she saw unlivable conditions—entire families crammed into a single room, apartments with no heat and no ventilation, the only light a solitary bulb hanging from the ceiling. Often there was one toilet down the hall serving a half dozen families. And every day she would hear heartbreaking stories of illness and unemployment, hunger and cold, desperation. Here again was proof that capitalism had failed, that greed had triumphed over humanitarianism. And even though she was working for a humanitarian operation, it seemed to her as if success on the job was measured by how many cases an investigator could close out and not on how much aid the agency could disburse or how many people could be helped.
Her caseload was so heavy that she skipped lunch to make home visits and did her paperwork—reams of it, it seemed, detailed studies and follow-ups, reports in triplicate—at home, after hours, squeezed in between her party meetings and her Workers School classes. She was horrified by the amount of red tape she and her clients had to go through, the number of weeks or even months it took to get a blanket for a young mother living in an unheated room. One day she went to visit an elderly black man living in a tiny furnished room. He had been employed as a Pullman porter most of his life. Now he was just another penniless man applying for relief. In order to process his application, Bentley needed to see proof that the man had lived in New York long enough to qualify for aid. Did he have a gas bill or a telephone bill, anything official showing his residence and a date? He didn’t. She told him he would have to go to a notary and sign a statement. It would cost him a quarter.
“Miss,” he said quietly, “if I had a quarter, I’d have eaten it.”
Bentley’s frustration with relief efforts was nothing compared to the frustration felt by those the agencies were supposed to help. More than 150 men and women marched on the relief office on East 149th Street, demanding aid for their families. Twenty people picketed the office on East 136th Street, parading with banners that called for the abolition of fire-traps, and clothes for the unemployed. People were collapsing on the street. Bentley felt increasingly helpless in the face of so much need, so much poverty. She herself was close to exhaustion.
But she had to pay attention to her party duties. When she got the job with the Relief Bureau, she had to leave the communist cell she originally joined, the Columbia University unit, and join a “shop unit” at her place of employment. But nothing was simple in the clandestine world. She was told to make contact with “Comrade H” at the Relief Bureau, but she knew enough not to be obvious about it. She arranged to accidentally run into her in the office hallway one afternoon. The woman looked at her sharply, clearly suspicious, clearly uncomfortable, told her to come to a meeting the next night, and hurried away. But Bentley had no idea where the meeting was, and Comrade H had made it obvious she didn’t want to be contacted again. Ever dutiful, Bentley stopped by Lee Fuhr’s place after work to ask her. Fuhr told her to go to an ap
artment on Lenox Avenue near 131st Street in Harlem. Bentley was scared to go to Harlem alone at night and was confused by the strange, conspiratorial arrangements that attended her change from one unit to another. But she ignored the voice in her head. She went against her own judgment. She was now enough of a communist that she trusted the party more than she trusted herself.
The communist unit at the Home Relief Bureau numbered only five people, including Bentley, all of them new to the party. The main job of the unit was to build support for a workers’ union, a tough assignment given that social workers were white-collar professionals who knew little about unions—and that people lucky enough to be employed were more interested in holding on to what they had than agitating for more. At the first meeting, over her own objections, Bentley was elected educational director. She had no idea what the job entailed and no idea how she would find time to do whatever it was she was supposed to do. But she said yes.
Between her party commitments and her relief work, her late-night, coffee-fueled sessions with the comrades, and her love affairs, she ran herself into the ground. One day she fainted at the office. The doctor she visited told her she needed a rest and “a more peaceful occupation.” She applied for a leave of absence, but while the paperwork was inching its way through the bureaucracy, she collapsed one night at the home of friends. The next day, she sent in her resignation.
Meanwhile, one of her comrades had introduced her to a woman calling herself Juliet Glazer, who said she was interested in doing research on Italian fascism and needed the assistance of a translator. Bentley was intrigued. She needed the money, and the work would be meaningful. The two women met several times at Glazer’s apartment. Bentley expected to learn more about the job and when she could start, but the conversations were exasperatingly vague. Still, Glazer kept contacting her, asking her to come to her apartment or meeting her for dinner or drinks. At one point, Glazer offered to pay Bentley’s graduate tuition in exchange for services rendered, but she never got around to saying what those services might be. During another conversation, Glazer asked Bentley if she would like to travel to Italy, informing her that her assignment would be to sleep with men to get information. Bentley was no prude, but she was shocked by the proposal and told Glazer so. A few days later, Glazer showed up at Bentley’s apartment, called her a Trotskyist—the ultimate insult one could level against a communist in those days—and threatened to kill her. Alarmed, Bentley told Lee Fuhr about her encounter. It was Bentley’s opinion that Glazer was a counterrevolutionary. Fuhr, on the other hand, thought she was a lesbian on the prowl.
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