(1) Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)

A few weeks after the publication of Spartacus (1951), John Howard Lawson, the party's cultural chief on the West Coast, attacked it bitterly. Lawson's small battle with Fast began when The Daily Worker asked me to do a regular column. I said I would agree only if the column bore the title "I Write As I Please." At first my request was turned down flat, but the editors wanted the column and finally agreed. But when Lawson, out in Los Angeles, saw my first column, he reacted like a bull to the red cape. He felt that the title was a violation of party discipline, and he argued his point hotly - that no person could belong to the party and write what he pleased to write. Suppose he attacked the party itself? Would The Daily Worker, a Communist paper, print what he wrote? Would any newspaper in America give a hired hand the privilege of writing as he pleased? My position was precisely that - that no other newspaper would print what I wrote, and if there was any validity to The Daily Worker and its Communist position, it was that this paper must give a writer the freedom denied him elsewhere.

 

(2) New York Times (28th October, 1956)

The Daily Worker, New York Communist newspaper, terms the use of Soviet troops in Hungary "deplorable" today and calls for the end of the fighting in that country... The editorial says, "the delay of the Hungarian Communists in developing their own path played into the hands of the counter-revolutionaries" After asserting the Soviet troops in Hungary had been used at the request of the Hungarian Government, the editorial added its only note of protest - "which does not, however, in our view, make the use of Soviet troops in Hungary any the less deplorable."

 

(3) Sandor Voros, American Commissar (1961)

The editorial offices of the Daily Worker were much neater, cleaner, and better equipped than when I had last seen them nearly two years before. The comrades also were better dressed, their shirts were clean, their collars were not frayed, they all wore ties and most of them were shaved. The party and the paper had evidently prospered. They gave me a good reception. I was still a hero, albeit a smaller one - having had a hand in the making of many a proletarian hero those comrades had a better perspective.

The Daily Worker wanted to put me to work right away - they were trying to build up the circulation of the Sunday Worker and claimed I was just the right man for it. I was to take over the editorship of the Sunday Worker Supplement and turn it into a popular literary magazine written in a non-party style that every worker and housewife could understand. Such a magazine circulated by the party throughout the country in hundreds of thousands, even millions of copies, would have a tremandous impact and influence on the people. It was an alluring project yet I refused, as I did the alternative offers to join the New York staff of the Daily Worker, or to revive the Daily Worker Ohio Bureau again. I told them I had a year of absence coming and intended to take it.

 

(4) Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)

The Communist Party leaders who had been imprisoned in 1950 now came out of jail, and John Gates, the best of them, the most innovative and independent, resumed his job as executive editor of The Daily Worker. It was under him that I joined the staff; a new life began for The Worker, and at the same time, a split in the leadership of the party between Gates and William Z. Foster, now seventy-five.

Since this is not a history of the Communist Party, I will not go into great detail concerning this split in the leadership; the origins of it were long in making and long in coming. William Z. Foster, Ben Davis, and Gene Dennis stood by the rigid doctrines of the Leninist pattern of organization, a party governed by theory that was neither pragmatic nor relevant to the American situation, a party of unbreakable discipline taking its cues from the Soviet party and rejecting every criticism of the Soviet Union. The opposition to this, led by John Gates, held that the Russians made grave errors, for which they must be criticized, that the rigid Leninist form was neither right for America nor helpful in the struggle of the American left, that it isolated the party, and was now bringing the party to its final moment of self-destruction. This, of course, is the briefest definition of what was happening.

Chaim Sutler returned from the Soviet Union and sought me out in private to tell me a horrendous story of the persecution, not only of Jews, but of others - executions without trial, whipping, torture - all of this under the benign rule of Josef Stalin. Writing in The Worker, I began to deal with these matters, but Sutler, for one, would not be quoted. The Worker staff defended me; the hatred of the leadership around Dennis and Foster for Howard Fast increased. They would have happily expelled me had I been alone, but the staff of The Worker was moving along the same road.

 

(5) John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (1959)

A particular role in this crisis was played by two of the Daily Worker's editors, Joseph Clark (who was our correspondent in Moscow from 1950 to 1953) and Joseph Starobin, who had been stationed in Paris from early 1951, and had then gone to Peking, where he was the first American correspondent to spend a year in the New China, and from which he also scored a "scoop" in visiting the battlefronts of the Indo-China war on the Ho Chi Minh side. He was the first Western correspondent to have done so since 1946. Both of these men were party veterans, and had held posts of confidence beyond the purely journalistic; Clark had been a YCL organizer in Detroit, and Starobin had directed the party's peace activities in 1949-51. Each of them had quite independently of the other reached radical conclusions while abroad. They felt that the party had lost touch with American realities. They insisted in their letters that the international situation was being misjudged, and they had begun to have doubts about many Russian policies. In their view, a drastic re-orientation away from imitations of the world Communist movement was essential, and they tried to suggest this upon their return in the summer of 1953, three years before the Khrushchev report.

(6) John Gates, The Story of an American Communist (1959)

Few were more shaken by the Khrushchev revelations than the Daily Worker staff, which had the daily responsibility of commenting on events. Alan Max spoke his mind boldly, on March 13, 1956, admitting that the Soviet Congress had jolted him: "We went overboard in defending the idea of Stalin's infallibility, in opposing any suggestion that civil liberties were not being fully respected in the Soviet Union."

"Where were the present Soviet leaders during the period when they say collective leadership was lacking?" he asked. Then he broached the key question: "What about our own mistakes?"

"What do our readers think about the matter?" Max went on. The readers thought plenty. The paper received an unprecedented flood of mail, and even more unprecedented, we decided to print all the letters, regardless of viewpoint - a step which the Daily Worker had never taken before. The full page of letters, in our modest eight pages, soon became its liveliest and most popular feature, a permanent department entitled "Speak Your Piece." Readers spoke out as never before, pouring out the anguish of many difficult years.

 

(7) Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)

At a meeting of the staff at The Daily Worker, Joe Clark, the Worker Moscow correspondent during the early fifties, told John Gates that if he, Gates, had been found in Moscow with a copy of The New York Times in his possession, he would have been subject to ten years' imprisonment. East balanced West, but Gates, in the free and democratic United States, had served a sentence of five years for committing no crime whatsoever. I asked them, "Is there anyone here who can believe that he would not be sentenced to death if the Foster group had the power to do it?"

I had a note from Sean O'Casey: "Don't be taken in by the bastards!" - meaning those who attacked Russia. To be a revolutionary in Ireland is more simple.

No, no way. The taking of a human life is the ultimate, inexcusable human evil. I learned that from World War Two. I learned that when I was in the Washington, D.C., jail, listening to the condemned men weeping in the night and pleading for life. I think I became a pacifist there. I am a pacifist still. Sean O'Casey might pursue his dreams of brotherhood through hell; I could not. Years before, I had brought charges of anti-Semitism against the representative of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, and the charges had been brushed away. Now we learned, at The Worker, that in 1948 all the Yiddish-language institutions and publications had been done away with, Yiddish-language poets put to death - a senseless crusade against the Jews, not in Germany but in the Soviet Union.

At The Daily Worker, we fought back. We accused the Soviets. We demanded explanations. For the first time in the life of the Communist Party of the United States, we challenged the Russians for the truth, we challenged the disgraceful executions that had taken place in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. We demanded explanations and openness. John Gates pulled no punches, printed the hundreds of letters that poured in from our readers, the bitterness of those who had given the best and most fruitful years of their lives to an organization that still clung to the tail of the Soviet Union.

Then, at that moment when we were fighting to make the paper a vehicle of truth and independence, the federal government stepped in and seized all the assets of The Worker - the editorial offices, all the premises - charging that we had not paid back taxes. Nobody knew better than the staff of the paper how ridiculous these charges were. Our annual deficit had never been below $200,000 a year, and again and again the paper was in a desperate crisis for funds. How many flying expeditions we had made to every corner of the metropolitan area to scrape together enough money to keep the paper alive for another few issues! In all my years with the paper, I had never taken a dollar for pay or expenses, but I was the only one on the staff who could afford to do that. The others were professional newspapermen who depended on their weekly wages to keep their families going; and again and again, they had missed paychecks because there was no money.

And now, after destroying thousands of people who believed in socialism, and jailing hundreds of others, and making life a living hell for people of good will all over the country, the idiots in the Treasury Department had thought up this new gimmick - closing the paper down for nonpayment of taxes.
They didn't quite succeed in closing us down, and the stupid move backfired. Every major newspaper in America cried out that this was a direct assault on freedom of the press and the First Amendment. Treasury agents seized our typewriters and files and office furniture, all of it worth about twenty cents. They slapped a lien on us that stated that The Daily Worker owed $46,049 in taxes and penalties for three years, from 1951 through 1953 - When major newspapers charged Washington with this idiocy, the Internal Revenue offices in Washington backed down and claimed that the raid had been undertaken without their knowledge, at the behest of Donald R. Moysey, a Treasury official. Moysey, no great intellect, had thought that the raids would increase his importance politically. The opposite was true.

 

(8) John Gates, The National Executive Committee of the American Communist Party (22nd December, 1957)

I do not consider the death of the Daily Worker inevitable... Substantial funds which would help to meet the paper's emergency are being deliberately withheld by a minority of comrades who are in effect waging a political strike against the program of the last Convention, against the majority of the national leadership and against the paper whose policy is in accord with that of the leadership. The national leadership must come to grips with this attempt to choke the Daily Worker. It must smash the boycott. The national leadership must face the fact squarely that the Daily Worker is not dying a natural death. It is being murdered.

The paper is being destroyed by a small group of willful and reckless comrades in the leadership who never believed in the 16th convention program in the first place and have done everything possible to reverse it. This group has been led by Comrades Foster and Davis and in recent weeks have been joined by Comrade Dennis . . . Throughout the 34 years of its existence, the Daily Worker has withstood the attacks of Big Business, the McCarthyites and other reactionaries. It has taken a drive from within the party - conceived in blind factionalism and dogmatism - to do what our foes have never been able to accomplish. The party leadership must once and for all repudiate the Foster thesis, defend the paper and its political line, and seek to unite the entire party behind the paper. It must reiterate the policy of the 16th Convention with its placing of dogmatism and sectarianism as the main danger and with its call for a new course in the party's theoretical and organizational work.

 

(9) Howard Fast, Being Red (1990)

The Daily Worker published its last issue on January 13, 1958, precisely thirty-four years after its first issue had appeared. I doubt whether there was a day during those decades when the paper was not in debt. It was always understaffed, and its staff was always underpaid. It never compromised with the truth as it saw the truth; and while it was at times rigid and believing of whatever the Soviet Union put forth, it was so only because of its blind faith in the socialist cause. It is a part of the history of this country, and like the party that supported it, it preached love for its native land. It had once boasted a daily circulation of close to 100,000. Its final run was five thousand copies.