Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  Only in Communism had I found any practical answer at all to the crisis, and the will to make that answer work. It was not an attractive answer, just as the Communist Party was not an attractive party. Neither was the problem which had called it forth, and which it proposed to solve, attractive. But it had one ultimate appeal. In place of desperation, it set the word: hope. If it was the outrage, it was also the hope of the world. In the 20th century, it seemed impossible to have hope on any other terms.

  When I rose from the bench, I had decided to leave college for good, and change the whole direction of my life. I had decided to join the Communist Party. The choice was not so much for a program that promised to end war, economic chaos and the moral enervation of the West. I had already said to myself what Lenin had already said better: “We do not presume to maintain that Marx or the Marxists can show us the way to socialism in perfectly concrete terms. That would be absurd. We know the direction of this road: we know which class forces lead to it. But in actual practice, only the experience of millions of men and women can show it when they begin the actual work.”

  The ultimate choice I made was not for a theory or a party. It was—and I submit that this is true for almost every man and woman who has made it—a choice against death and for life. I asked only the privilege of serving humbly and selflessly that force which from death could evoke life, that might save, as I then supposed, what was savable in a society that had lost the will to save itself. I was willing to accept Communism in whatever terms it presented itself, to follow the logic of its course wherever it might lead me, and to suffer the penalties without which nothing in life can be achieved. For it offered me what nothing else in the dying world had power to offer at the same intensity—faith and a vision, something for which to live and something for which to die. It demanded of me those things which have always stirred what is best in men—courage, poverty, self-sacrifice, discipline, intelligence, my life, and, at need, my death.

  I went to my campus friends who had so long and patiently worked to convert me to Communism and said that at last I was ready. I asked them where the Communist Party could be found. To my great surprise, they did not know. For I was then unfamiliar with that type of fellow traveler who also serves Communism, but chiefly by sitting and talking.

  I remembered that there had once passed across the Columbia campus a high-strung, red-headed boy from an upstate college. He had slept overnight on the bare floor of a friend’s room in one of the residence halls. He talked incessantly in a voice like a teletype machine; and what he talked about was the Soviet Union and Communism. His name was Sender Carlin. I thought that Sender Garlin would probably know where to find the Communist Party. Presently I located him.

  Garlin said that, in fact, there was no Communist Party. For reasons of expediency, the Communist Party which had just come up from underground, now called itself the Workers Party. He was not sure that he knew how to contact it or that he knew anyone in it. But if it turned out that he did, he would mention my name, and a man might presently come to see me.

  I decided that Garlin knew exactly where to find the Communist Party and was telling me that he would put me in touch with it.

  4

  THE COMMUNIST PARTY

  I

  A stocky young man in a shabby overcoat walked past my desk in the Public Library and studied me. Then he walked back and studied me from another angle. He did this several times. I thought: “He is the man. He is the contact with the Communist Party.”

  Then the first American Communist I had ever seen edged up to the desk, looked at me out of distrustful, rather glassy eyes, and asked: “Are you Chambers?”

  I looked at his dead-fish eyes and said that I was.

  “I am the man you were told about,” he said. “You want to join?”

  “Yes,” I said, “I want to join.”

  “Why?”

  I said that I believed that Communism was the answer to the social crisis and that I wanted to do something about it.

  “Do you read the Daily Worker?” he asked.

  “Sometimes,” I said. “Usually I read the Volkszeitung.” The Volkszeitung was the best of the American Communist newspapers. It was published in German in New York City. Its editor was Ludwig Lore, who was expelled from the Communist Party (for “incurable Loreism”) shortly after I joined it and whom I was later to know in the Communist underground. The Daily Worker was written in a heavy-handed gibberish that was almost unreadable.

  “Have you read Marx’s Capital?”

  I said: “No,” but that I had read The Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s State and Revolution.

  “You ought to read Capital,” said my man pedantically. “They all think it’s smart nowadays to read Lenin. Nobody knows anything any more about Marx or economics.”

  Evidently, he had made up his mind to take a chance on me, for he confided that he would take me to a meeting, and named a night when he would return for me. Then he left, blending easily with the stream of shabby or derelict people that flowed in and out of the newspaper room, where many of them came for warmth on bitter nights.

  II

  A few nights later, the Communist with the glassy eyes came back. It was the early spring of 1925, and cold. He steered me toward the Hudson River, and we worked our way on foot, against the wind, toward 59th Street. While we walked, he told me that his name was Sam Krieger. “But my name in the party,” he said, “is Clarence Miller. Did you ever hear of the Clarence Miller case?” I said no. “You never heard of the Clarence Miller case?” he asked with what I took to be a touch of contempt. I said no.

  He explained that he had once been a Wobbly (from him I first learned that a Wobbly is a member of the I.W.W.). He had been arrested somewhere in the West for some radical activity. The Civil Liberties Union had come to his rescue, and Krieger had at last gone free. For Roger Baldwin, the head of the Civil Liberties Union, he had a respect quite unusual among Communists. For while Communists make full use of liberals and their solicitudes, and sometimes flatter them to their faces, in private they treat them with that sneering contempt that the strong and predatory almost invariably feel for victims who volunteer to help in their own victimization.

  Not far from the Hudson River, somewhere on or near 59th Street, Krieger drew me into a dark doorway. We went up a dirty stairway to a big lighted loft. At the door two or three short, dark men looked us over silently, nodded to Krieger and let us pass.

  The ceilings and walls of the loft were festooned with faded red crepe paper put up for some past proletarian fête and never taken down. Two banks of folding chairs with an aisle between faced a plain table and some chairs, where I supposed that the leaders of the meeting sat. It was chilly in the loft. Most people wore their coats. At one side of the room, a group of Greeks were making hot tea, which they peddled for a few cents. It was served, in the Russian style, in glasses. My first impression was one of cold, dirt and drab disorder. I would presently learn that bleakness and disorder were the mark of all Communist Party offices, that this expressed a reaction, sometimes conscious, sometimes unconscious, against middle-class preoccupation with tidiness. I never got used to it.

  I had expected to find a small group of Communists. I had hoped that they would be staid and serious working people, whose faces would reflect a sincerity and a purpose equal to the task of carrying through the greatest revolution in history. There were forty or fifty men and women in the loft. They were of several nationalities, but broken English, Greek and Yiddish seemed to be the prevailing languages: everybody was talking at once. There was a continuous buzz through which, now and again, a strident argumentative voice would slice. As I looked at my future comrades, they seemed to me less like the praetorian guard of the world revolution than a rather undisciplined group of small delicatessen keepers. (How unflatteringly they looked at me I would soon learn.)

  Krieger began to identify various comrades out of the side of his mouth. “That’s Gand. He’s a Russian.”
I looked at a tall, pale man who was chain-smoking cigarettes. He was not talking to anyone, but staring intently at various individuals, shifting his gaze when they looked at him. “That’s Ben Gitlow. He just got out of jail. You must have heard of Gitlow.” Gitlow had been a Socialist member of the New York state legislature who had spent several years in prison for advocating the overthrow of the Government. He was a big, rather soft-looking, very pallid man with a pleasant, brooding, somewhat sad face. “That’s Ma Gitlow next to him. The man is his father.”

  Everybody had taken a sidelong glance at me. But several comrades came up boldly and Krieger introduced them. “This is Comrade Bosse.” Comrade Bosse was a neatly dressed man about thirty-two years old. I believe that he was an economics teacher. He stood so loosely that he seemed to be double-jointed. He was bald, which helped to give him the look of a baby that is prematurely aged.

  “This,” said Krieger, “is Eve Chambers.” Eve Chambers (her real name was Eve Dorf) was a brisk, dark girl who needed only a bandolier of cartridges to look like a partisan. “And this is her husband, David Benjamin.” David Benjamin was another pale-faced man with dark, quick eyes. Both Benjamin and his wife were schoolteachers. Both were conspicuously friendly. I thought then that they regarded me as a kindred intellectual. Presently I learned from Krieger that they regarded me as a potential recruit in the factional fight which was dividing the minds, and engrossing most of the time, of that small, anomalous band.

  Eve Chambers and her husband have long been out of the Communist Party. They were expelled as “incurable right-wing deviationists and Lovestoneites” when the Stalinists took over the party in 1929. Today, David Benjamin is better known by his real name, Ben Davidson, and as an active lieutenant of the chief of the Liberal Party in New York—AdoIf A. Berle, with whom, fourteen years later, when Berle was security officer of the State Department, I was to have a momentous conversation about Communist espionage.

  This group of Communists was called the English-speaking branch of the Communist Party. It was called “English-speaking” to distinguish it from the more numerous Communist units where English was not spoken, and to indicate that the business of the meeting would be conducted in English, however broken.

  What the business of my first meeting was I have forgotten. Much of it, in fact, I could not understand. For the Communists, even when speaking English, spoke a dialect most of whose terms—Polburo (political bureau), Ekki (Executive Committee of the Communist International)—I had never heard before. I soon grasped that Communist forensics had its own style. No matter what message a speaker had to deliver, it seemed to be etiquette for him to deliver it as ferociously and rudely as possible. At one point a heavy-set handsome woman rose from her seat and announced calmly: “The comrade is a liar.” That was my first glimpse of Juliet Stuart Poyntz, a Midwestern American and Barnard graduate whose murder by the Russian secret police, thirteen years later, made a deep impression on me about the time of my break with the Soviet underground.

  One incident at that meeting I never forgot. “Mother” Gitlow demanded the floor. She was the first of the American Communist Party’s “mothers.” After her expulsion from the party (circa 1929, for “incurable right-wing deviationism”), she was replaced by the late “Mother” Bloor whose son, Harold Ware, organized that Washington underground in which I was later to meet Alger Hiss.

  Most of the speakers had merely leaped to their feet and stood by their chairs—all that was necessary in view of the fact that many of them had only a brief invective to deliver. Mother Gitlow left her seat, walked to the front of the room and turned to glare at the meeting. She was a short, sturdy Jewish woman, with shrewd eyes behind her glasses, suggesting a touch of earthy horse sense. She stood silent for a moment, waiting for the meeting to become quiet—an interval that she used to roll up or draw back her sleeves as if for a brawl. Then she said in a tone of challenge: “Cumreds! The potato crop has failed in Ireland and thousands of peasants are starving to death. Cumreds! What are we doing to help the starving workers and peasants of Ireland?”

  There was a good deal more. I recognized the comic overtones. They did not seem funny to me. Mother Gitlow was Communism in action. That short, squat, belligerent woman, pleading in a thick Yiddish accent for food for hungry Irish peasants, personified the brotherhood of all the wretched of the earth. It made no difference that most Irish peasants would have hooted her out of town. She knew that too. But she was the Communist. In her worked the revolutionary will to overcome ignorance and prejudice in the name of militant compassion and intelligent human unity. In the light of her appeal, it made little difference that that small mob of Communists was torn by dissension. So long as there existed within the party one such woman to act, and men and women who understood her, the pulse of Communism pumped life, however feebly, into the veins of the future.

  I do not mean that, on hearing her, I broke into a sweat of enthusiasm. I was more like a new recruit in the awkward squad, who looks around him, notes one or two others, and thinks: “If we can ever be licked into shape, we may some day make a company in the army of the future. At least, there are others.”

  I thought, as I left the meeting: “I did not expect much. I see that we shall have to begin even farther back than I expected.” I was not disturbed or dejected. A Communist knows that a given situation, in a given period of history, will produce certain human materials, and that those, and only those, are what history gives him to work with. The point is to work with them right. Then the situation and history will change, and, with it, the human material.

  III

  I was not admitted to the Communist Party at my first meeting. First I was looked over. Looking over consisted chiefly of being invited several times to visit Sam Krieger and his wife. Sam Krieger was then the circulation manager of the Yonkers (New York) Statesman, which, of course, did not know that he was a Communist. Krieger pushed sales by giving bicycles to enterprising newsboys who, on competitive principles that would later be known as Stakhanovite, sold the most copies of that capitalist newspaper.

  I used to meet Krieger at the Statesman office. He would drive me in a rather rattly car to the outskirts of Yonkers, where he and his wife had a small apartment and a large (and fierce) police dog. Carol Krieger was the daughter of the owner of a well-known chain of aseptic cafeterias on whose windows his name appeared in big, embossed, white enamel letters. She was a pretty girl, rather insipid, and ailing—one of her arms was nerveless or partially paralyzed. The Kriegers belonged to the extreme left wing of the Communist Party. They regarded marriage as a “bourgeois convention” and loathed it with the same intensity with which many middle-class persons loathe sin. Theirs was the first “party marriage” that I observed. I was also to observe, when it broke up, that “party marriages” sometimes led Communists to emotional upsets as shattering as any suffered by the bourgeoisie.

  From Krieger I began to learn my way around the Communist Party. I learned that there were in it two factions (or fractions, as Krieger and many other Communists called them). One faction was headed, in some kind of uneasy fellowship, by William Z. Foster, Alexander Bittelman, William F. Dunne and James Cannon. This was the group that Sam Krieger belonged to. The other group was headed by the secretary of the party, Charles Ruthenberg, and Jay Lovestone. This was the group that Comrade Bosse, David Benjamin, Eve Chambers and the Gitlows belonged to.

  For under the fiction of unity, the factions fought fiercely and shamelessly. Each sought to gain control by any means of the party press and all the units of the party organization. Each circulated secret mimeographed attacks on the other or promoted scandalous whispering campaigns, in which embezzlement of party money, homosexuality and stool pigeon were the preferred whispers.

  This seemed to me a distressing and wasteful way for a party, poor in human and all other resources, to organize against the most powerful capitalism in the world. But again, I realized that no political organization can rise above its human
and historical level and that these were the growing pains unavoidable in an immature party, recruited necessarily from a low level of the population, at an early period of its history. As the party developed, it would outgrow its dissensions.

  After a few meetings, Krieger proposed me for membership in the Communist Party. I cannot report that the “general staff of the world revolution” gathered me in by acclaim. Some members abstained from voting, and there was a flurry of hands against me. There was nothing personal in this, Sam Krieger explained, after I had been inducted. The comrades who voted against me were members of the Lovestone faction. They had simply feared that, since Krieger was my sponsor, I would add one more vote to the strength of the Foster group.

  After the voting, Ben Davidson and others took me aside and suggested that I was making a mistake to join the Communist Party under my own name. “Why?” I said. “I am not ashamed to be a Communist.” I thought that they looked at me a little pityingly.

  Later on, I went to the Manhattan headquarters of the Workers Party on 14th Street. There I met a fidgety, kindly man who duly issued me, in the name of Whittaker Chambers, a red party book, listing my party number, stamped with the party’s rubber seal (a hammer and sickle) and signed by the nervous man’s name: Bert Miller. I knew Bert Miller for many years and even worked closely with him in the Communist Party until his expulsion (another “incurable right-wing deviationist”) in 1929. In all that time I never knew his real name. It was General Walter Krivitsky who first told me, one day, shortly before his strange death in Washington, that Bert Miller was really Ben Mandel. And it was almost a decade after that before I would resume my close acquaintance with Ben Mandel. By then he was the research director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and I was a witness before it.