The
right-wing leadership of the Socialist
Party of America opposed the Russian
Revolution. On 24th May 1919 the leadership expelled 20,000 members
who supported the Soviet government. The process continued and by
the beginning of July two-thirds of the party had been suspended or
expelled.
Some
of these people, including John Reed, William
Z. Foster, James
Cannon,
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Ella
Reeve Bloor, Claude McKay, Michael
Gold and Robert Minor, decided to form
the American Communist Party. By August 1919 it had 60,000 members
whereas the Socialist Party of America
had only 40,000.
The
growth of the American Communist Party worried Woodrow
Wilson and his administration and America entered what became
known as the Red Scare period. On 7th
November, 1919, the second anniversary of the revolution, Alexander
Mitchell Palmer, Wilson's attorney general, ordered the arrest
of over 10,000 suspected communists and anarchists. These people were
charged with "advocating force, violence and unlawful means to
overthrow the Government".
Palmer
and his assistant, John Edgar Hoover,
found no evidence of a proposed revolution but large number of these
suspects were held without trial for a long time. The vast majority
were eventually released but Emma Goldman,
Alexander Berkman, Mollie
Steimer, and 245 other people, were deported to Russia.
The
American Communist Party established the Daily
Worker newspaper in 1924. It generally reflected the prevailing
views of the party. However, attempts were made to make it a paper
that reflected the wide-spectrum of left-wing opinion. At its peak,
the newspaper achieved a circulation of 35,000.
James
Cannon,
the first chairman of the American Communist Party, attended the Sixth
Congress of the Comintern
in 1928. While in the Soviet Union he was
given a document written by Leon Trotsky
on the rule of Joseph Stalin. Convinced
by what he read, when he returned to the United
States he criticized the Soviet government. As a result of his
actions, Cannon and his followers were expelled from the party. Cannon
now joined with other Trotskyists to form the Communist
League of America.
By
1929 the American Communist Party only had 7,000 members. Most of
these were immigrants living in and around New
York City. There were also a large number involved in the arts
including Elia Kazan, Erskine
Caldwell, John Dos Passos, Howard
Fast, Pete Seeger, Clifford
Odets, Larry Parks, John
Garfield, Howard Da Silva, Gale
Sondergaard, Joseph Bromberg, Richard
Wright, Dalton Trumbo, Richard
Collins, Budd Schulberg, Herbert
Biberman, Lester Cole, Albert
Maltz, Edwin Rolfe, Adrian
Scott, Samuel Ornitz, Paul
Jarrico, Edward Dmytryk, Ring
Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson
and Alvah Bessie
The largest vote recorded by the American Communist Party was for
William Z. Foster in the presidential
election in 1932. Foster polled 102,991 votes, but Norman
Thomas, the Socialist Party candidate,
polled seven times that figure. Earl Browder
was the candidate for the next two elections but did badly: 1936 (80,195)
and 1940 (46,251).
On the
outbreak of the Spanish Civil
War the Communist Party helped to recruit people to join
the International Brigades. Those
willing to fight to defend the Popular Front
government in Spain established the Abraham
Lincoln Battalion, the George Washington
Battalion and the Mackenzie-Papineau
Battalion. Members who fought against the Nationalist
Army included William Aalto,
Hans Amlie, Bill
Bailey , Robert Merriman, Steve
Nelson, Walter
Grant,
Alvah
Bessie,
Joe Dallet, David
Doran, John Gates, Harry
Haywood, Oliver
Law, Edwin
Rolfe and Milton
Wolff.
During
the Second World War, when the United
States and the Soviet Union were wartime
allies, membership of the party reached 75,000. After the war the
situation completely changed. The Alien Registration
Act was used against the American Communist Party. On 20th July,
1948, twelve party leaders, included Eugene
Dennis, William Z. Foster and Benjamin
Davis, were arrested and charged under the Alien
Registration Act. This law, passed by Congress in 1940, made it
illegal for anyone in the United States "to advocate, abet, or
teach the desirability of overthrowing the government".
The case began in March, 1948. It was difficult for the prosecution
to prove that the twelve men had broken the Alien
Registration Act, as none of the defendants had ever openly called
for violence or had been involved in accumulating weapons for a proposed
revolution. The prosecution therefore relied on passages from the
work of Karl Marx and other revolution figures
from the past.
The prosecution also used the testimony of former members of the American
Communist Party to help show that they had privately advocated
the overthrow of the government. The most important witness against
the leaders of the party was Louis Budenz,
the former managing editor of the party's newspaper, The
Daily Worker.
Another strategy of the prosecution was to ask the defendants questions
about other party members. Unwilling to provide information on fellow
comrades, they were put in prison and charged with contempt of court.
The trial dragged on for eleven months and eventually, the judge,
Harold Medina, who made no attempt to disguise his own feelings about
the defendants, sent the party's lawyers to prison for contempt of
court. After a nine month trial the leaders of the American
Communist Party were found guilty of violating the Alien
Registration Act and sentenced to five years imprisonment.
Gus
Hall
was sentenced to a five year prison term and so fled to Mexico and
in 1950 was elected as the party's National Secretary. The following
year he was arrested by the authorities and was brought back to the
United States where he was sentenced to an additional
three years.
The activities of the House of Un-American Activities
Committee and McCarthyism also
had a detrimental effect on membership and by 1957 it had fallen to
10,000. The Daily Worker also
ceased publication in 1957.
On
his release from prison Gus
Hall became
General Secretary of the Communist Party. He ran for president in
1968 but received only 1,075 votes. He was also the party's candidate
in 1972 and 1976 when he obtained 58,992 votes. In 1984 Hall's vote
dropped to 36,386 votes and in 1988 the Communist Party gave its support
to Jessie
Jackson in
his bid to obtain the nomination of the Democratic
Party.
Gus
Hall
remained leader of the American Communist Party until his death on
13th October, 2000.
(1)
James
Cannon, speech, New
York City (23rd December, 1921)
We have had for two years many struggles and much strife in our ranks.
This was inevitable after the great upheaval of the World War and
the Russian Revolution that shook all of our organizations to their
foundations and put every one of our old theories and dogmas to the
acid test. Every one of us was compelled to revise some of his theories
and some of his plans. It was no more than natural, I might say it
was inevitable, that in the beginning we should have some confusion
and some disintegration.
The task is before us.
We have a labor movement that is completely discouraged and demoralized.
We have an organized labor movement that is unable on any front to
put up an effective struggle against the drive of destruction organized
by the masters. We have a revolutionary movement which, until this
inspirational call for a Workers Party convention, was disheartened,
discouraged and demoralized. Our labor unions, upon which the workers
build their first line of resistance; and I want to say right here,
comrades, that you must face it as the most menacing thing on the
horizon - the labor unions of America are being broken up because
there is not sufficient unified understanding, because there is not
sufficient leadership to save them. And I say that unless we, comrades,
unless we, the revolutionary workers - we who know that only on a
program of the class struggle can they mass and fight victoriously;
unless we organize and prepare to unify and direct them, to lead their
struggles, then, I say, the American labor unions will be destroyed
and black reaction will settle upon this country. We have a responsibility
upon us, and we must find the way out.
Yes, reaction is in full
sway in America. Many of our finest spirits, our bravest boys, our
best fighters, wear their lives away in the penitentiaries of America.
The boys that threw themselves into the struggle during the war, those
who did not take down their flag when the persecution became severe,
the very cream of the movement, have languished in prison for over
two years, and I say it is a shame and a disgrace that we have not
made any effective protest against it. It is a pitiful thing that
for two years the campaign for the release of our fellow workers and
comrades, which should have been carried on upon the basis of the
class struggle, which should have been the rallying cry to arouse
the workers and inspire an irresistible campaign for amnesty, has
been left almost entirely to such as the American Civil Liberties
Bureau on the one hand, the Socialist Party's Amnesty Committee on
the other, and the IWW lawyers on the third; and there is very little
difference among them. Now, I say, we are going to stem the tide.
We are going to stop the stampede by putting up a program and plan
of action with a set of fighting leaders and give out the rallying
cry: Fellow workers, stand and fight! It is better to die in the struggle
than to be crushed to death without resistance!
(2)
Albert Maltz was interviewed by Victor
Navasky while he was writing his book, Naming Names (1982)
By the time I was at college, I became very alert to the question
of racial discrimination, and I remember one of my first writing attempts
had to do with a lynching. I graduated in 1930 and I went up to the
Yale Drama School for two years. By the time I came down from Yale,
I was already more radicalized and had begun to read New Masses.
I also read the Marxist classics. I still think it to be the noblest
set of ideals ever penned by man. The fact that many of them have
been so ill-realized in the Soviet Union today didn't matter. Where
else in political literature do you find thinkers saying tat we were
going to end all forms of human exploitation? Wage exploitation, exploitation
of women by men, the exploitation of people of colour by white peoples,
the exploitation of colonial countries by imperialist countries. And
Marx spoke of the fact that socialism will be the kingdom of freedom,
where man realizes himself in a way that humankind has never seen
before. This was an inspiring body of literature to read.
When I joined the Communist movement in 1935 it was based upon the
belief that mankind's future was to be found there. Certainly, millions
who joined it the world over, like myself, didn't join it for profit.
There was nothing to be gained out of joining it: It could be time-consuming.
It could prevent you from reading a number of books that you wanted
to read or go to a number of films because you were doing other things.
But there was a belief that you were working with others toward making
the world a better place to live in.
I considered it to be an honour to be a member of the Party, and by
the way I haven't changed my mind about that now. I would not be a
member of any Communist Party, because of what life has taught me,
and especially the American Communist Party, which in certain things
I think is absolutely disgusting. Its silence, for instance, on Polish
anti-Semitism around 1968 which drove Jews out of Poland is, I think,
just disgusting. There's no other word for it.
(3)
Howard Johnson interviewed by Julia Reichert (1979)
When I joined the Communist Party it was as if all of a sudden
my life had been taken out of a small box and I had plugged into the
entire globe internationally. The first thing that impressed me about
all the party members that I came in contact with was the range of
their conversation and their interests. They seemed to be informed
about everything that was going on. They could talk about music. There
was a Marxist analysis of music. They could talk about art. There
was a Marxist analysis of art. They could talk about the international
situation. The meaning and significance of collective security. They
were so well informed.
(4)
Rose Krysak interviewed by Julia Reichert (1979)
I was a very devoted member of the Communist Party. At the
beginning almost without questioning. I never questioned them because
I really felt they had all the answers. As I grew older and things
developed I learned to question a little bit, but I always felt that
on any shortcomings the party had, I felt in essence they are going
toward their goal which was a good one and I want to be part of it.
So that when people are critical I say yes that's from a mistake maybe,
but that's not the important thing. The important thing is the ultimate
goal.
(5)
In a letter to Theodore Draper written on 27th May 1959, James
Cannon explained why he
decided to support Leon Trotsky in 1928.
In the summer of 1928 in Moscow, in addition to the theoretical and
political revelation that came to me when I read Trotsky's Criticism
of the Draft Program of the Comintern, there was another consideration
that hit me where I live. That was the fact that Trotsky had been
expelled and deported to far away Alma Ata; that his friends and supporters
had been slandered and expelled and imprisoned; and that the whole
damned thing was a frame-up!
Had I set
out as a boy to fight for justice for Moyer and Haywood in order to
betray the cause of justice when it was put squarely up to me in a
case of transcendent importance to the whole future of the human race?
A copybook moralist could easily answer that question by saying: "Of
course not. The rule is plain. You do what you have to do, even if
it costs you your head." But it wasn't so simple for me in the
summer of 1928. I was not a copybook moralist. I was a party politician
and factionalist who had learned how to cut corners. I knew that at
the time, and the self-knowledge made me uneasy.
I had been
gradually settling down into an assured position as a party official
with an office and staff, a position that I could easily maintain
- as long as I kept within definite limits and rules which I knew
all about, and conducted myself with the facility and skill which
had become almost second nature to me in the long drawn out factional
fights.
I knew
that. And I knew something else that I never told anybody about, but
which I had to tell myself for the first time in Moscow in the summer
of 1928. The footloose Wobbly rebel that I used to be had imperceptibly
begun to fit comfortably into a swivel chair, protecting himself in
his seat by small maneuvers and evasions, and even permitting himself
a certain conceit about his adroit accommodation to this shabby game.
I saw myself for the first time then as another person, as a revolutionist
who was on the road to becoming a bureaucrat. The image was hideous,
and I turned away from it in disgust.
I never
deceived myself for a moment about the most probable consequences
of my decision to support Trotsky in the summer of 1928. I knew it
was going to cost me my head and also my swivel chair, but I thought:
What the hell - better men than I have risked their heads and their
swivel chairs for truth and justice. Trotsky and his associates were
doing it at that very moment in the exile camps and prisons of the
Soviet Union. It was no more than right that one man, however limited
his qualifications, should remember what he started out in his youth
to fight for, and speak out for their cause and try to make the world
hear, or at least to let the exiled and imprisoned Russian Oppositionists
know that they had found a new friend and supporter.
(6)
James
Cannon, The
Militant (January 1, 1929)
In the period that has intervened since our expulsion on October 25,
we have continued to regard ourselves as party members and have conducted
ourselves as Communists, as we have done since the foundation of the
party, and even for years before that. Every step we have taken has
been guided by this conception. Those acts which went beyond the bounds
of ordinary party procedure in bringing our views before the party
were imposed upon us by the action of the party leadership in denying
us the right and opportunity to defend our views within the party
by normal means. Our views relate to principled questions, and therefore
it is our duty openly to defend them in spite of all attempts to suppress
them.
We are
bound to do this also in the future under all circumstances. However,
we said on October 25, and we repeat now, that we are unconditionally
willing to confine our activity to regular party channels and to discontinue
all extraordinary methods the moment our party rights are restored
and we are permitted to defend our views in the party press and at
party meetings. The decision and the responsibility rest wholly with
the majority of the Central Executive Committee.
Events
since our expulsion have only served to confirm more surely the correctness
of the views of the Russian Opposition, which we support. The momentous
developments in the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and throughout
the Comintern have that meaning and no other. Life itself is proving
the validity of their platform. Even those who fought that platform,
who misrepresented it and hid it from the party and the Comintern,
are today compelled, under the pressure of events and forces which
overwhelm them, to give lip service to it, to pretend to adopt it.
Many of the statements and proposals of the Opposition which were
branded "counterrevolutionary" a year ago are today solemnly
repeated, almost word for word, as the quintessence of Bolshevism.
Meanwhile
their sponsors - the true leaders and defenders of the Russian Revolution
- remain in exile, and there is no guarantee whatever that the presently
advertised "left course" will mean anything more than a
cover for further concessions to the right wing, whose policy directly
undermines the dictatorship. The victorious fight of the party masses
in Russia and throughout the Comintern against this disgraceful and
dangerous course cannot be much longer postponed.
Bureaucratic
suppression has its own logic. It begins with the expulsion of individuals
and ends with the disruption of the movement. Yesterday we saw the
attempt to suppress the views of the Oppositionists who fight the
party regime on principled grounds. Today already, in spired resolutions
from the party units are making the same demand against the limited
criticisms of the Foster group, with the threat of organizational
measures after the packed and gerrymandered convention has "endorsed"
the regime. Bureaucratism is alien to the proletarian Communist movement.
Bureaucratism cannot stand criticism. It cannot stand discussion.
Bureaucratism, which is an expression of bourgeois influence, and
Lenin's proletarian doctrine cannot live together.
The regime
of bureaucratic strangulation, which expels its outspoken opponents
and bludgeons the party into silence, has become an international
phenomenon of the period. This is the only key to an understanding
of its absolutely unprecedented excesses. A real struggle against
it cannot be made without an understanding of its international scope.
On this, as well as on the other principled questions, the fight of
the proletarian Communist elements in all parties unites with the
Bolshevik fight of the Russian Opposition under the leadership of
Trotsky.
At the
Fourteenth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Stalin
issued a warning against the course he later adopted, and predicted
its disruptive consequences. He defended there the refusal to expel
Trotsky from the Political Bureau and said: "We are against the
policy of lopping off, of bloodletting (it was blood they wanted).
It is a dangerous thing. One day you lop off this limb. Tomorrow another,
and the next day a third. And after a while, what becomes of the party?"
Stalin
forgot these words so full of prophetic significance. He formed a
factional combination with the right wing to suppress and expel the
left, the Opposition. He gave the signal for the same line in all
the parties of the Comintern. As a result, in the recent years we
have seen everywhere a strengthening of the opportunist elements,
an enormous development and entrenchment of bureaucratism, and wholesale
expulsions of the proletarian left - the core of the workers' vanguard.
All the little Stalins in all the parties are bolstering themselves
up by these means.
(7)
Jessica Mitford, and her husband, Robert
Treuhaft,
joined the American Communist Party during the Second
World War. She wrote about it in her autobiography, A Fine
Old Conflict (1977)
As an observer from the sidelines I had long been
aware of the Party's propensity for swift and fundamental policy changes.
I had seen the Party switch with the advent of the Nazi-Soviet pact
of 1939 from advocacy of a united stand against the fascist powers
to condemnation of the 'imperilaist war' - a stand with which I totally
disagreed. Two years later, when Hitler marched on the Soviet Union,
the Party again shifted position and pledged its all to the war effort.
But once a member, I do not remember ever questioning 'the correctness
of the line', as we would have put it. I was enchanted by the flesh-and-blood
Communists we now
began meeting, veterans of the 1934 waterfront strike, of the trade
union organizing drive of the thirties, of bitter battles between
agricultural workers in the San Joaquin valley and hired thugs sent
in by Associated Farmers. There were, to be sure, a number of bores
and misfits in our organization, but even these seemed to be to some
extent redeemed by their dedication to our common cause.
The Party operated on
the principle of 'democratic centralism', which meant that all members
were required to study, discuss and vote on all matters of policy;
once the decision had been taken, each member was bound by it, whether
or not he. or she personally agreed with it. It was indeed a matter
of conform or get out, but this did not particularly bother me. I
had regarded joining the Party as one of the most important decisions
of my adult life. I loved and admired the people in it, and was more
than willing to accept the leadership of those far more experienced
than I. Furthermore, the principle of democratic centralism seemed
to me essential to the functioning of a revolutionary organization
in a hostile world.
(8)
J. Edgar Hoover,
A Study of Communism (1962)
One of the first opportunities to exploit political and social upheaval
abroad arose in Spain. When a civil war broke out in that country
in 1936, the Communists acted in line with the theory that the Soviet
Union should be used as the base for the extension of Communist control
over other countries. Soviet intervention in the Spanish civil war
was twofold in nature. First, in response to directions from the Comintern,
the international Communist movement organized International Brigades
to fight in Spain. A typical unit was the Abraham Lincoln Brigade,
organized in the United States. It succeeded in recruiting about 3,000
men. In all, the Communist parties of 53 countries were represented
in the International Brigades with a total fighting strength of approximately
18,000, the first of whom arrived in Spain during the latter part
of 1936. Second, the Soviet Union furnished direct military assistance
in the form of tanks, artillery, and aircraft flown by Soviet pilots.
For two years, Moscow pursued its objectives in the Spanish struggle.
However, Soviet intervention ended in the fall of 1938, when the national
interest of the Soviet Union forced it to turn its attention elsewhere.
In Europe, Hitler's strength was steadily increasing. In addition,
Japan's armed invasion of Manchuria posed a direct threat to Soviet
territory in the Far East. At the end of 1938, the International Brigades
withdrew from Spain. Many Communists throughout the world who answered
the Comintern's call to fight in Spain were repaid subsequently by
Soviet assistance in their attempts to seize power in their respective
countries. Among those identified with Communist efforts in connection
with the Spanish civil war who subsequently gained prominence in the
Communist movement were Tito (Yugoslavia), Palmiro Togliatti (Italy),
Jacques Duclos (France), Klement Gottwald (Czechoslovakia), Erno Gero
and Laszlo Rajk (Hungary), and Walter Ulbricht (East Germany).
(9)
Howard
Zinn,
A People's History of the United States (1980)
In 1940, with the United States not yet at war, Congress passed
the Smith Act. This took Espionage Act prohibitions against talk or
writing that would lead to refusal of duty in the armed forces and
applied them to peacetime. The Smith Act also made it a crime to advocate
the overthrow of the government by force and violence, or to join
any group that advocated this, or to publish anything with such ideas.
In Minneapolis in 1943, eighteen members of the Socialist Workers
party were convicted for belonging to a party whose ideas, expressed
in its Declaration of Principles, and in the Communist Manifesto,
were said to violate the Smith Act. They were sentenced to prison
terms, and the Supreme Court refused to review their case.
(10)
Paul
Robeson, Here I Stand
(1958)
It has been alleged that I am part of
some kind of international conspiracy. I am not and never have been
involved in any international conspiracy or any other kind, and do
not know anyone who is. My belief in the principles of scientific
socialism, my deep conviction that for all mankind a socialist society
represents an advance to a higher stage of life - that it is a form
of society represents an advance to a higher stage of life - that
it is a form of society which is economically, socially, culturally,
and ethically superior to a system based upon production for private
profit have nothing in common with silly notions about 'plots' and
'conspiracies.'
(11)
Max
Shachtman, speech at New York
City's Webster Hall on 30th March, 1950.
If the
cold horror of Stalinist despotism, that vast prison camp of peoples
and nations, represents the victory of socialism, then we are lost;
then the ideal of socialist freedom, justice, equality, and brotherhood
has proved to be an unattainable Utopia; then the National Association
of Manufacturers is right in saying that while capitalism is not perfect
and has a couple of defects here and there, socialism is a new slavery;
then we must be resigned to that appalling decay of modern civilization
that is eating away the substance of human achievement. But if it
can be shown that Stalinist Russia is not socialism, that it has nothing
in common with socialism, that it is only another and very ominous
lesson of what happens to society when the working class fails to
fight, and extend its fight, for socialism, or when its fight is arrested
or crushed; if it can be shown that Stalinist Russia is a new barbarism
which results precisely from our failure up to now to establish a
socialist society, to extend the Revolution of 1917 that took place
in Russia - then, despite the agony that grips the world today, there
is a hope and a future for the socialist emancipation of the race.
It is from that standpoint and no other that I will seek to show that
Stalinist Russia has nothing at all in common with socialism. The
best way to begin is by defining socialism.
Socialism
is based upon the common ownership and democratic control of the means
of production and exchange, upon production for use as against production
for profit, upon the abolition of all classes, all class divisions,
class privilege, class rule, upon the production of such abundance
that the struggle for material needs is completely eliminated, so
that humanity, at last freed from economic exploitation, from oppression,
from any form of coercion by a state machine, can devote itself to
its fullest intellectual and cultural development. Much can perhaps
be added to this definition, but anything less you can call whatever
you wish, but it will not be socialism.
Now, if this definition
is correct - as it has been considered by every socialist from the
days of Marx to the days of Lenin - then there is not only not a trace
of socialism in Russia, but it is moving in a direction which is the
very opposite of socialism.
It is absolutely true that
by their revolution in 1917 the Russian working class, under the leadership
of the Bolsheviks, took the first great, bold, inspiring leap toward
a socialist society. And that alone, regardless of what happened subsequently,
justified it and made it a historic event that can never be eliminated
from the consciousness of society. But it is likewise true that the
working class of Russia was hurled back, it was crushed, and fettered
and imprisoned, and that every achievement of the revolution, without
exception, was destroyed by the victorious counter-revolution of the
Stalinist bureaucracy which now rules the Russian empire with totalitarian
absolutism.
(12)
Howard Fast, reviewing
The Thirteenth Juror by Steve Nelson in Masses & Mainsream
(June, 1955)
I have been told that it is difficult to read a book objectively
when you know the author; and there is an old saying which asks, "How
can he be a genius? I know him." Neither precisely to the case
in point, for I know Steve Nelson well and cannot think of him as
a genius, but only as a very great and brave man; and I read his new
book, not objectively, but with a deeply subjective and highly personal
involvement - read it from cover to cover almost in a sitting. And
when I had finished it, I knew I had read one of those very rare and
wonderful books - a book that changes you in the process of its reading,
so that finished with it, I was something more than I had been when
I opened it.
I also
know that I cannot write of the book without writing of the man; for
the book is most profoundly moving in its utter and implacable truth,
and this truth is also the man. Both are a part of the same experience.
I have never read another book quite like this one, but I have also
never known another man quite like Steve Nelson; and the knowledge
of both fills me with pride and humility, not only because I have
shared something of the struggle that produced both, but because through
both I came better to understand people and what people will be someday.
The Thirteenth
Juror is the story of Steve Nelson's trial, his trial before a court
of law, as law exists in the United States today, and his trial in
the court of horror and infamy that is otherwise known as Blawnox
Workhouse. The first half of the book is devoted to Blawnox, and as
such, it has few equals in the whole history of prison literature.
In the same breath, one must note, Blawnox Prison in Pennsylvania
is possibly unequaled today, as a place of horror and degradation,
in all of these United States and very likely in much of the world
outside of our borders.
Into Blawnox
came Steve Nelson, political prisoner, Communist, veteran of the International
Brigade in Spain - now sentenced to twenty years, sentenced on charges
that were no charges, on evidence that was no evidence, on the word
of stool pigeons and paid informers - into a dungeon of hell and horror,
and told by the guards as he entered that there was no road back,
that he could neither survive this place nor ever hope to leave this
place; and the story of this dungeon, of how he faced it, fought it
as one man, sick and weak, and finally triumphed over it, is the story
Nelson tells in the first half of his book. In this, the first half
of his book, Steve Nelson reaches his highest point of artistry as
a writer - in a breathless and splendidly-told story of man's courage
and man's will to survive.
Parts of
this section, such as Nelson's experience in the "hole"
and his leadership and organization of the other prisoners in the
"hole," are of a quality that a reader cannot easily forget,
and will, simply as literature, long survive the memory of the men
who did this to Steve Nelson; and as a whole, this section comprises
a unique and fine literary product. The second half of the book tells
the story of Steve Nelson's trial before Judge Montgomery in a Pittsburgh
courthouse, of how, unable to find a lawyer, he defended himself,
of how a sick and broken body was forced by an indomitable spirit
to wage a legal battle and defense that will rank with Dimitrov's
famous defense before a Nazi Court. The book concludes with Nelson's
eloquent plea to the Jury - his battle against the "thirteenth"
juror, who is bigotry, prejudice and fear.
To one
degree or another, all of America lived through the content of this
book. Some, all too many, knew only the bare facts of Steve Nelson's
name and the charges leveled against him. Others, who read the newspaper
stories a little more closely, heard Nelson accused as an atom-bomb
spy, an agent of a foreign power, a Communist "master-mind."
Still others, men in high places, in the Pennsylvania judiciary, in
the nests of the steel and aluminum moguls of Pittsburgh, in the offices
of the Justice Department in Washington, played parts in the manufacturing
of false charges, in the rigging of juries, in the hiring of informers
- coldly and deliberately, so that they might destroy this man they
feared and hated. Still others worked and testified in the defense
of Steve Nelson, as Art Shields and Herbert Aptheker did, and others
turned ears deafened by fear and indifference to pleas that they come
to the defense of a good and brave man. And all over America, millions
of workers, who knew nothing of the case and were indifferent to it
to the extent of the lies and slanders fed to them these many years,
also lived through the content for out of their struggles, their hopes
and needs and ideology, had come the man whom we know as Steve Nelson,
and the courage of the man and the splendor of the man as well.
Within
this context, The Thirteenth Juror must be seen and understood;
for this book is a symbol of the America we have known and lived in
and worked in this decade past; and in so being, it contains the worst
and the best that is America. The book will live, because it is a
truthful and profound human document, and it will still be read when
the situation which produced it has long since come to an end. At
that time, it will be judged anew as literature, and without question
parts of it will be reprinted innumerable times as literature; but
an objective literary judgment is almost impossible today - just as
it would have been both impossible and insufferable to have judged
Julius Fuchik's Notes From the Gallows as literature while
Czechoslovakia still lay under the Nazi heel. Then, as now, we were
concerned with the man; and perhaps so long as our literature comes
out of an agony, we will continue to be concerned with the man before
we are concerned with the book.
Thus, it
is important to dwell for a moment on the man - the manner of a man
who wrote this book. The book is a tense, well-written and extremely
moving document, but above all these things, it is an exceedingly
simple document. Here I use simple in the best sense, in terms of
a proletarian clarity which evokes the best from the language. In
the same manner, one must see the author - as one does see him through
this book - as a simple man, a virtuous man, and above all things,
a good man. In the process of an ethical decay in our society during
this past decade, we have retained the meaning of certain words used
to describe people, but we have wholly lost the meaning of others.
This too is a question of values. We still comprehend what one means
when one calls a person brilliant, clever, witty, dogged, stubborn,
etc. Our understanding clouds a little when such words as sincere
and forthright are used; and in a society which maintains only one
criterion for values - did he get away with it? - we are becoming
at a loss to comprehend the meaning of good and honorable.
Yet the
essence of Steve Nelson is that he is an honorable and a good man.
His nature is neither brilliant nor derived from fanaticism; his wisdom,
a deep and wonderfully profound wisdom, is the wisdom of the good
man who understands evil, and therefore must set his face against
evil and venture his life in the struggle against evil - and his understanding
is the understanding of a member of the working class who has become
a Marxist and a Communist. This combination of values is not new on
this earth, but it is rare in America. On the other hand, it is America
that has produced Steve Nelson.
And not
alone Steve Nelson, for one of the hallmarks of the decade we have
lived through are the men and women of quality and stature who have
emerged as figures and symbols of American resistance. In other times
of the past and in times still to come, the quality of America was
and will be symbolized by mass motion and mass courage; but when the
situation is such as not to produce these mass currents, the responsibility
for patriotism - a very high and historic responsibility - falls upon
the shoulders of a few. Thus, in time to come, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg
will be a part of the living and honored tradition of America, not
the mean and craven Judge Irving Kaufman who acted as their executioner.
If there was only here and there a lonely example of such courage
and nobility as the Rosenbergs displayed, then one could have little
hope and less respect for the American people; but there have been
literally thousands who displayed, to one degree or another, the superb
courage of the Rosenbergs, and out of these thousands came the giants
like Nelson - even as the thousands came out of the body-whole of
the population.
The
Thirteenth Juror tells the story of the contest between Steve
Nelson and Judge Montgomery of Pittsburgh, between those gathered
around Nelson for his defense, Art Shields, Herbert Aptheker, Pat
Cush, Ben Careathers, Margaret Nelson and those who gathered around
Montgomery for the prosecution, Musmanno, Cercone, Cvetic, Crouch.
On the one hand, Nelson, anti-fascist soldier and Communist, stands
with a great journalist, a noted historian and scholar, an old labor
leader, a Communist trade-unionist and organizer, and a brave mother
and companion; on the other hand, Montgomery, political hack and traducer
of justice, stands with a notorious fascist and former admirer of
Mussolini, the nephew of this fascist, a craven and stupid political
appointee, with a psychopathic liar and professional informer, and
lastly Crouch, professional informer. Thus, the contest, and thus,
symbolically, the two Americas that exist within this body whole known
as the United States.
The contest
is also a battle between honor, courage and integrity on the one hand
and dishonor, cowardice and perversion of all decency on the other
hand. As to which of these will win, there can be little doubt. All
of life and all of the future stands with the Steve Nelsons, and in
good time, millions of Americans will come to know this and take their
place by his side. And as for Montgomery, Musmanno, Cercone they too
will be remembered, but only as the shameful and craven creatures
who obeyed the orders of the iron and munition lords of Pittsburgh
and framed and convicted a great man.
One more
word must be said of the fine job Steve Nelson does of exposing another
part of the shameful and rotten prison system that exists in the United
States - a system which in the land of plenty reduces men to starvation,
denies them medical care, and - being an integral part of the "free
world" - subjects them to such mental and physical torture as
would shame the keeper of a medieval dungeon. If you have been puzzled
about the rash of prison riots breaking out everywhere in the country,
this book will provide your answer. I also profoundly hope that it
will provide a death blow to that unspeakable cancer on the body of
the State of Pennsylvania - Blawnox Workhouse.
(13) Kansas City Times (15th March,
1960)
The breaking of a 15 year silence by Earl Browder, former
leader of the American Communist party, in an article written for
the March number of Harper's magazine comprises and interesting disclosure
of how Browder and his party were "purged" by Stalin in
1945.
The purging followed Browder's adoption of the principle of a stable
peace at the close of World War II based on the Tehran pact signed
by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill - Stalin "with tongue in cheek."
The pact, in Browder's view, implied the doctrine of co-existence
and, in principle, a repudiation of the cold war which "Stalin
adopted to take the place of the hot war then coming to a close."
Browder, now 68, a native of Wichita with three sons teaching mathematics
in American universities relates how his "apostasy" was
disclosed and his purge announced in the famous "Duclos letter,"
allegedly penned by Jacques Duclos in a French Communist journal in
1945, but actually Kremlin-dictated. This letter, widely circulated,
denounced Browder for interpreting the Tehran pact as a "political
platform for class peace in the United States - and sowing dangerous
opportunistic illusions."
He declares that the American Communist party "need not have
died such a shameful death as William Z. Foster (ultra-left sectarian
who succeeded him), under the inspiration of Stalin and the cold war,
inflicted upon it." He states that he had personally led an Americanization
trend in the party based on Jeffersonian principles and representing
a denial of Marxist dogmas.
"The Duclos letter," Browder writes, "halted and reversed
the process of Americanization. The party quickly turned anti-American.
Foster published a 'new history' of America, which was highly praised
in Moscow, translated in many languages and made a handbook of anti-American
propaganda all over the world.
"This extraordinary book interpreted the history of America from
its discovery to the present, as an orgy of 'bloody banditry' and
imperialism, enriching itself by 'drinking the rich red blood' of
other peoples. Foster even joined in the Thorez declaration (by Maurice
Thorez, French Communist leader: that if the Soviet armies found it
necessary to occupy all Western Europe the working people would greet
them as liberators; the only thing missing was a direct welcome to
Soviet armies in America itself.
"It was this that killed the Communist party. Its former mass
following melted away. Its membership shrank to a hard core of fanatics.
The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reforms.
But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet
Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse,
the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a
bad word in the American language."
Americans should realize, Browder believes, that "the only solid
representatives of Stalin among the American Communists were a little
band of 'old timers,' occupying strategic posts in the party apparatus.
For them communism was a religion, Stalin was Mohammed and Moscow
was Mecca.
(14)
Earl Browder, Harper's
Magazine (March, 1960)
The American Communists had thrived as champions of domestic reform.
But when the Communists abandoned reforms and championed a Soviet
Union openly contemptuous of America while predicting its quick collapse,
the same party lost all its hard-won influence. It became merely a
bad word in the American language.
I knew I could not maintain that leadership in open struggle against
Moscow influence. Only two Communist leaders in history ever succeeded
in doing this - Tito and Mao Tse-tung. I confined my resistance to
the Duclos Letter to declaring publicly that it was a disastrous mistake
which I would never approve. But I made no efforts to organize my
supporters to hold on to the apparatus. Consequently I was soon expelled
and my followers, who did not change coats overnight, quietly left
or were expelled from the party.
I have opposed the Communist cold war line ever since, both by public
utterance and by private help to trade unionists breaking free from
the Communist influence. I abandoned the party apparatus to Stalin's
adherents in order to prevent them from capturing the party's former
mass influence almost a decade I have not considered myself a Communist,
nor even a Marxist in the dogmatic sense.
By the 1950s, my break with the Russians had led me into a basic re-examination
of Marxist theory, and I followed in Marx's footsteps with the declaration:
'I am not a Marxist.' My personal revolution in thinking is, of course,
of importance only as an example of how the shattering years of the
cold war have broken up the old patterns of thought - behind the iron
curtain as profoundly as in the West, although there it is revealed
mainly in the lightning flashes of mass discontent and revolts.
What remains constant for me, during the last 15 years, has been the
conviction that the cold war was a calamity for the entire world,
and that it can be justified by no consideration of theory, nor by
any supposed national interest. I can only hope that Khrushchev's
new line of talk portends a new line of action to which America can
respond in kind. Such hopes are, however, tempered by years of disillusioning
memories, which remind us all that it takes two sides to make a peace.
(15)
Jessica
Mitford, A Fine Old Conflict
(1977)
Early in 1958 John
Gates resigned from the Party, saying it had "ceased to be an
effective force for democracy, peace and socialism in the United States",
and that he did "not believe it is possible any longer to serve
those ideals within the Communist Party'. Gates's Party career had
been an illustrious one. He had fought in Spain where he became the
highest-ranking officer of the Lincoln Brigade. As one of the first
group of Smith Act defendants, he had done time in the
Atlanta Penitentiary. Under his editorship the Daily Worker had been
transformed from a house organ for transmission of policy directives
by the leadership into a lively forum for debate. His resignation
was a heavy blow indeed.
(16)
E.Howard
Hunt, interviewed for the television
programme, Backyard
(21st February, 1999)
To me, communism
is a... it's a graveyard of skulls, of very unhappy people, below
the level of the top bureaucracy. ... communism is an expansive form
of political theory: it has to keep eating on its neighbors, finding
new aggressive activities to keep itself going, fuelling itself. It
itself is fuelled on hatred, hatred of capitalism, hatred of so-called
imper, when yet it's the greatest imperialist power the world has
ever known.... There's a basic hypocrisy about them.
(17)
William A. Reuben, review of The Secret World of American Communism
in the journal Rights (1995).
As if progressives had not in recent years been battered and bludgeoned
enough already, we now learn that J. Edgar Hoover, Senator Joseph
McCarthy, Roy Cohn, Elizabeth Bentley, Whittaker Chambers & company
really got it right: all Communists are/were actual, or wannabee,
Russian spies. We also learn that during the Cold War years (and even
before) hordes of leftists were abroad in the land, stealing "our"
atomic secrets (and God only knows what else) for delivery to Joseph
Stalin.
In recent
days, this message has been dunned into our ears by such opinion-makers
as William F. Buckley, Jr., George Will, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.,
Theodore Draper, Michael Thomas, Edward Jay Epstein and David Garrow
in the pages of The New York Times, The New Republic,
Commentar, Wall Street Journal, The National Review,
the "McNeil-Lehrer NewsHour," and lots more (without a dissenting
voice to be heard anywhere).
This all-out
blitz has been fueled by The Secret World of American Communism,
written by Professor Harvey Klehr, of Emory University, John Earl
Haynes, of the Library of Congress, and Fridrikh Igorevich Firsov,
formerly of the Comintern Archives in Moscow at the Russian Center
for the Preservation and Study of Documents in Recent History. The
authors claim to have put together a "massive documentary record"
from the hitherto secret Comintern archives, revealing "the dark
side of American communism." These documents establish, they
say, proof both of "Soviet espionage in America" and of
the American Communist Party's "inherent" connection with
Soviet espionage operations and with its espionage services; and that
such spy activities were considered, by both Soviet and the American
CP leaders, "normal and proper."
Such assertions
are not all that different from what J. Edgar Hoover (and his stooges)
were saying half a century ago. But what reinforces the authors' statements
are not only the documents from the Russian archives they claim to
have uncovered, but also the imposing editorial advisory committee
assembled to give this project an eminent scholarly cachet. This editorial
advisory committee consists of 30 academics whose names are listed
opposite the title page. They include seven Yale University professors,
along with professors from Harvard, Columbia, Stanford, Chicago, Brandeis,
Southern Methodist, Pittsburgh and Rochester universities. There are
also an equal number of members of the Russian Academy of Sciences
and of officials of various Russian archives.
Reproduced
in the book are 92 documents offered by the authors as evidence of
what they say is the United States Communist Party's continuous history
of "covert activity." These documents, according to Professor
Steven Merrit Minor in The New York Times Book Review, reveal that
American Communists "relayed atomic secrets to the Kremlin"
and also support the testimony of Whittaker Chambers and others that
the American Communist Party was engaged in underground conspiracies
against the American Government. The authors also say that the documents
suggest that those "who continued to claim otherwise were either
willfully naive or, more likely, dishonest."
In actuality,
many of the documents are ambiguously worded or in some sort of code
known only to the senders and recipients. They often contain illegible
words, numbers and signatures; relate to unidentifiable persons, places
and events; and are preoccupied with bookkeeping matters, inner-party
hassles or with protective security measures against FBI and Trotskyite
spies. Most importantly, not a single document reproduced in this
volume provides evidence of espionage. Ignoring all evidence that
contradicts their thesis, the authors attempt to make a case relying
on assumption, speculation, and invention about the archival material
and, especially, by equating secrecy with illegal spying.
The book's
high points are sections relating to what the authors call atomic
espionage and the CP Washington spy apparatus. As someone who has
carefully examined the archives at the Russian Center, and who over
the past four decades has studied the trial transcripts of the major
Cold War "spy" cases, I can state that "The Secret
World of American Communism," notwithstanding its scholarly accouterments,
is a disgracefully shoddy work, replete with errors, distortions and
outright lies. As a purported work of objective scholarship, it is
nothing less than a fraud.
In this
context, certain facts ought to be noted:
* The Moscow
archives contain no material relating to these key figures in the
Cold War "spy" cases: Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, Morton
Sobell, Ruth and David Greenglass, Harry Gold, Klaus Fuchs, Elizabeth
Bentley, Hede Massing, Noel Field, Harry Dexter White, Alger Hiss,
Whittaker Chambers, Colonel Boris Bykov and J. Peters. In my possession
is a document, responding to my request, and dated October 12, 1992,
signed by Oleg Naumov, Deputy Director of the Russian Center for the
Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, attesting that
the Center has no files on, or relating to, any of the above-named
persons.
* Despite
the authors' assertion that the documents in this volume show that
the CPUSA's elaborate underground apparatus collaborated with Soviet
espionage services and also engaged in stealing the secrets of America's
atomic bomb project, not one of the 92 documents reproduced in this
book supports such a conclusion.
* The authors
claim the documents corroborate Whittaker Chambers' allegations about
a Communist underground in Washington, D.C. in the 1930s, and while
the authors concede that Alger Hiss's name does not appear in any
of the documents, they assert that the "subsequent documentation
has further substantiated the case that Hiss was a spy." Yet,
not one document from the Russian archives supports any of these damning
statements.
A total
of 15 pages in "Secret World" have some reference either
to Hiss or Chambers. By my count, these contain 73 separate misrepresentations
of fact or downright lies. For example, the authors claim that J.
Peters "played a key role in Chambers' story" that Hiss
was a Soviet spy. Peters played no role in Chambers' story about espionage.
Chambers said that the key figure in his espionage activities with
Hiss was a Russian named "Colonel Boris Bykov," a character
whose identity the FBI spent years futilely trying to establish.
The authors
claim Chambers testified he worked in the Communist underground in
the 1930s with groups of government employees who "provided the
CPUSA with information about sensitive government activities."
In fact, Chambers testified to the exact contrary on 12 separate occasions.
References
to Ethel and Julius Rosenberg and their case can be found on five
pages. In those pages, by my tally, are 31 falsehoods or distortions
of evidence. For example, the authors say the Rosenbergs' conviction
was for "involvement in...atomic espionage." In fact they
were convicted of conspiracy, and no evidence was ever produced that
they ever handed over any information about anything to anyone.
The authors
also say the Rosenbergs were arrested as a result of information the
authorities obtained from Klaus Fuchs, which led to Harry Gold, who
led them to David Greenglass, who implicated the Rosenbergs. All of
these statements are based on an FBI press release. In fact, no evidence
has ever been produced that indicates that Fuchs, Gold or Greenglass
ever mentioned the Rosenbergs before their arrests.
Discussing
one other "spy" case, that of Judith Coplon, against whom
all charges were dismissed, the authors in typical contempt of official
court records write that "there was not the slightest doubt of
her guilt." In comments running no less than half a page, they
invent a scenario of the Coplon case that contains 14 outright lies
and distortions. For instance, the authors say she "stole"
an FBI report and she was arrested when she handed over' the stolen
report "to a Soviet citizen." All these statements are false;
in her two trials, no evidence was ever adduced that she ever stole
anything or that she ever handed over anything to anyone.
Within
the space of a book review, to detail all the fictions piled into
"Secret World" is utterly impractical. Three examples will
have to suffice to demonstrate the authors' brand of scholarship:
* The late
Steve Nelson, a onetime CP official who is referred to many times
by the authors, is thus characterized, on page 230: "After World
War II, U.S. officials charged that he was involved in Soviet spying,
including atomic espionage."
Such a
charge was once made against Nelson by the Republican-dominated HUAC.
Following two weeks of secret hearings at the beginning of the 1948
presidential election campaign, HUAC, on September 27, 1948, issued
a 20,000 word report charging that the Democratic Party was indifferent
to Soviet espionage. It named Nelson as the pivotal figure in an atom
spy network that was allegedly operating in the United States.
To equate
the thoroughly discredited HUAC with "U.S. officials," as
do the authors of "Secret World," is bad enough, but much
worse is ignoring what was actually said by U.S. officials. This came
by way of a statement issued that September by the Department of Justice.
These U.S. officials branded the HUAC report as utterly without merit,
an exercise in "political gymnastics," issued by a "politically
minded Congressional committee with one eye on publicity and the other
on election results." Of course, neither Nelson nor any of the
others named as members of a Soviet atom spy ring was ever charged
with any such crime.
* The name
of Earl Browder, who was head of the American Communist Party from
1930 until he was deposed in 1945, runs through the entire book. All
the episodes of espionage alleged in the book occur during his watch.
Asserting that no CPUSA participation in Soviet espionage could have
been conducted "without approval" from Browder, the authors
state flatly that he "was himself no stranger to Soviet intelligence"
and was "fully cognizant" of Communists' involvement in
spying for the Soviets, "including atomic espionage."
Until his
death, Browder repeatedly and categorically denied all such charges,
but except for a passing reference, nowhere are those statements included
in the book. He even denied them in 1950 before the Tydings Committee
and was never charged with perjury.
* The Hiss
case and the story told by Whittaker Chambers about the Washington
underground together make up the high point not only of "Secret
World" but of most of its reviews as well. The only documentary
support in the entire volume for the authors' unqualified conclusion
as to Hiss's guilt and Chambers' truthfulness is offered in Documents
32 and 33, neither of which is from the Comintem archives.
Exhibit
32 is the text of a one-paragraph extract - undated, unsigned, without
salutation or any indication of the sender or recipient - said to
have been sent by Ambassador William Bullitt to R. Walton Moore, Assistant
Secretary of State. It offers generalized comments about events in
Europe, together with Moore's comments said to have been sent to an
unidentified third party. Document 33 is the printed text of an unsigned,
chatty letter, dated October 19, 1936, said to have been sent to President
Roosevelt by William Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, offering generalized
opinions about the state of affairs in Germany. Neither document was
marked secret or classified.
In "Secret
World," no explanation is offered as to how or when or through
whom the originals of these documents wound up in the hands of the
authors in Moscow. Yet they claim that these two exhibits provide
"direct evidence" in support of Chambers' story about Hiss
and the Washington underground. Actually, the only thing it provides
"direct evidence" of is that, as scholarship, this book
is worthless.
(18)
William
Patterson,
The Man Who Cried Genocide (1971)
With the help of my new progressive and Communist
friends, I began to explore the roots of society's most rampant diseases
- racism and exploitation. They lay deep in the imperative for continuing
profit and power among those who controlled our economy, our legal
system, our government. As time went on, it became crystal-clear to
me that the horrors of colour persecution and poverty could only be
fully grappled with in a struggle against the economic and social
forces that had spawned them. In my special concern with the oppression
of Black men and women, I felt it was essential to achieve
unity between Black and
white workers - nothing was more certain than that the powers that
be were concerned with preventing that unity at all costs.
If, in these pages, I
direct my sharpest barbs against racism, it is because I could not
get away from it - it was my constant and unwanted companion. How
could I possibly speak dispassionately of the crimes committed in
its name? But the military-industrial-governmental complex lays heavy
burdens on other minority peoples as well as on white workers, turning
them, periodically or chronically into jobless, homeless expatriates
in a land of plenty. To me, the only hope lay in socialism - the only
system that had shown itself capable of ending the terrible contradictions
of a profit society. When I saw that the Communist Party was taking
the lead in the struggle for the rights of minorities and of labor,
exposing the role of imperialism in conquest and war, I found that
my constant concern with the racist issue became an integral part
of the broader struggle for human rights everywhere.
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