Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  IV

  I hurried up to Columbia University to inform my friends on the campus that I had located the Communist Party, had made contact with it, and was, in fact, a registered member. By chance, the first man I met as I crossed the campus was one of my literary friends. I told him the news. As usual, he squinted one eye and lifted the eyebrow of the other, so that he looked as if he were peering through a monocle. “Do you drill in a cellar with machine guns?” he asked airily. It was he who, when I was first seeking enlightenment about Communism, had given me The Communist Manifesto to read. Now I saw that Communism as an idea was diverting. Communism as an idea to do something about was amusing. I turned away.

  I looked up another great friend who was later with the Theater Guild. More than any other individual, he had been directly responsible for swinging me toward Marxism. Now that I was a Communist, I explained, I would be able to bring him into the party at once. There were some moments of painful embarrassment. He was delighted at my political enterprise, but he had no intention of joining the Communist Party himself. Nevertheless, his position was awkward and he felt obliged to put me off without actually saying no. The same pattern was repeated with others.

  For the first time, I understood the contempt with which Communists pronounced the word “intellectuals.” I thought: “That miscellaneous mob in the English-speaking branch may not know the English language, but they know a good deal about history. They are not as intelligent as my college friends, but they do not think that ideas are ping-pong balls. They believe that ideas are important as a guide to coherent action. They have purpose and they have courage. They are grown men and women, and these are children.”

  I felt a sudden warmth for my shabby, quarrelsome comrades, and a readiness to overlook their failings in the name of their faith and purpose. I began to see less and less of my college friends. There was a period when I scarcely saw them at all. But they had not forgotten me.

  One night one of them showed up inexplicably at the Daily Worker office, and stood chatting with me even in the clatter of the composing room. Soon others appeared. I was not yet aware of it, but the great leftward swing of the American intellectuals had begun. I suddenly found myself in the role of a pioneer. But the hands of the clock of history had bumped a long way ahead. The year was 1929, and I was preparing to break away for the first time from the party which they had, belatedly, caught up with.

  V

  The word “intellectual” was the most lethal in the invective vocabulary of Communism. No one who could read or speak fluently was entirely invulnerable to it. Even a high-school education laid a man open to attack. No matter how ably a Communist might argue a point, he could almost always be stopped by any illiterate who chose to fling the annihilating term. “Isn’t he an intellectual?” one comrade would ask about another in a tone of one teetotaler asking about another: “Isn’t he a drunkard?”

  Several comrades tried out the word on me or in my hearing. I was, happily, fairly immune to its effects, in part because, while indubitably an intellectual, I seldom thought of myself as one and did not like most intellectuals who did; in part because I agreed that in the nature of the revolutionary struggle, an intellectual could never be quite as reliable a Communist as someone who had the good fortune to be born in a tenement. For every society has its standards of nobility, and I was, moreover, not yet experienced enough to observe that every Communist Party in the world is led and staffed chiefly by middle-class intellectuals.

  Besides, I had entered the Communist Party with a proper sense of humility—with somewhat the same feeling with which another man might enter a religious order. After a rapid glance around, I had few illusions about the party. Its methods were slipshod and much of its personnel inadequate or absurd. But about its historical necessity and purpose I had no doubts. I wished to serve. I did not particularly care how.

  One day, shortly after we had met, Sam Krieger proposed that I should do “Jimmie Higgins work.” He explained to me patiently that Jimmie Higgins is a character in one of Upton Sinclair’s novels or stories with a passion for lowly jobs. I shared no such passion, but I readily agreed, for I wanted to know the party from the ground up. I began with the Daily Worker, but not on its editorial staff.

  The party’s “central organ,” the Daily Worker, was then published in Chicago. But the paper had a New York office, a bare room on 14th Street. There Louis Katterfeld, the Worker’s New York representative, presided.

  Katterfeld looked like the type of Communist I had hoped to find on my first visit to the English-speaking branch. He was a German-American, humorless, grave, with a lined, austere face. He had been an unsuccessful Kansas wheat farmer, graduating from a native school of agrarian radicalism. Poverty was a vocation with him. His frayed overcoat was the uniform of his faith, and, like everything else about him, it was of a piece with a revolutionary integrity that shone from him more purely than from almost any other American Communist I knew. He lived in a little house on Long Island in the same woods where I had wandered as a boy, for, like me, he did not like cities. He had a big family of boys and girls, and, when I had come to know him better, he once confided to me with wistful dismay that his children “regarded the Communist Party the way Communists regard capitalism—as a cause of poverty and exploitation.” They wanted to live like other people and detested Communists and Communist meetings.

  During the party’s underground days Katterfeld had briefly been the party’s acting secretary. But his revolutionary intelligence was not quite up to his revolutionary spirit. Both made him something of a butt for men who were less good and less devout, but brighter. He was an extreme leftist and held that the Communist Party should have remained permanently underground, sensing, I think, that the underground experience inevitably winnowed out men less dedicated than himself, and thus left a core of hardened professional revolutionists. He could not face the fact that Lenin had tirelessly taught that, when a whole Communist party is outlawed, it is almost wholly paralyzed because it can no longer send into the surrounding community the filaments whereby it spreads its toxins and from which it draws its strength and life. That a hard core of devoted men like himself existed was more important to Katterfeld than what they existed for.

  When the Lovestoneites took power in the party, Katterfeld withdrew from it. He began to publish a magazine called Evolution, for his mind was in many ways a petrifact of 19th-century radicalism, and among its oddments of conviction was militant Darwinism. I remember Evolution chiefly for one of its covers in which a stroke of editorial imagination came magnificently to the aid of its chronic poverty. The cover was simply a block of black ink in the middle of which was a pinpoint of white. It was titled: The Human Egg Magnified Several Million Times.

  This was the Communist to whom I first offered my unpaid services. He looked me over in much the same way as the hiring boss in Baltimore had done. Clearly, he did not believe that I would be around very long. He set me to doing the task that nobody else would do—newsstand collections for the Daily Worker. Paying my own fare, I traveled around New York City, settling with news dealers for the Daily Workers they had sold, collecting the unsold copies in an old suitcase. One day I would be far out in Brooklyn, the next day in the Bronx. Years later, in my remote rambles about New York with Colonel Bykov, I would suddenly realize that I had been in some outlying place before, and think: “Oh, yes, it was when I was making newsstand collections for the Daily Worker.”

  At the time I took over that duty, collections had not been made for a long while. Most of the dealers had no records of their sales and their accounts were largely fanciful. No doubt, they cheated me, but there was no way of preventing that. They were wretchedly poor men and women, and surly. In winter, they sat, bundled in wads of clothing, whipped by the wind in draughty stands under elevated stairs or on exposed street corners. Some of them were members of the Communist Party. I could always tell these because they displayed the Daily Worker prominently.

>   In time, I was able to bring some order into the collections and my regularity won the co-operation of the news dealers and the grudging respect of Katterfeld. Once in a while, a dealer would ask me: “Are you really a Communist?” The sight of a literate man patiently going about a humble chore puzzled them. “It is worth more,” I used to think, “than all the unreadable propaganda in the Daily Worker.” For a propaganda of words that is not backed by a propaganda of deeds is worthless.

  VI

  It is an axiom of Communism that practical activity and theory go hand in hand. Theory guides practical activity. Practical activity roots theory in reality and prevents it from becoming merely abstract. Comrade Krieger was not only concerned that I should collect Daily Workers. He was equally concerned about my “ideological development.” In those days, ideology was one of the indispensable words in the Communist quiver, yielding only to “oriented,” or its commoner form, “orientated”—as in the question: “Is the comrade properly orientated on that issue?” Krieger felt (quite rightly) that there were many issues on which I was not properly “orientated.”

  He pressed me to join a study group to which he and his wife belonged, with some ten or fifteen others. The group was led by Scott Nearing. It met once a week, sometimes in the Rand School, the Socialist headquarters on East 15th Street, sometimes in a Communist office. Its members were trying to formulate ( another favorite word) “the law of social revolution.” The members of the group, singly, or in teams, were writing papers on each of the great modern revolutions. When the papers were completed, the group would ponder upon the result and from it deduce the unifying law that underlay all violent political change. Scott Nearing and some of the more “developed” students would then formulate this revolutionary law in a study which would form a preface to the book that was to be made of all the papers.

  It was a good deal harder to enlist me in this project than in Jimmie Higgins work. I suspected that Marx, Engels, Lenin and others had already formulated history’s laws of motion more effectively than most American Communists could do. I finally joined up, more to observe the mind of Scott Nearing at work than for the sake of anything it might work on.

  For Nearing, unlike most others in the radical movement, was not a new name to me. When I was a boy, Scott Nearing had been a young, Socialist economics instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. In class, one day, he had made a slighting reference to the millionaire, Edward T. Stotesbury. An academic storm blew up. Nearing left the University of Pennsylvania, amidst shrill cries of “Perish freedom!” The hubbub fixed itself in my mind because my mother, who was in most ways intensely conservative, admired Nearing greatly and was one of his partisans. For Nearing’s face was his fate. It combined intelligence with strength, was as native American as Gary Cooper and somewhat in the same style. Women always flocked around him and, even at the time I knew him, the devotion of his volunteer secretaries was a subject for smiles among Communists.

  When I first began to explore the law of social revolution, Nearing was not a Communist. But he had made a trip to the Soviet Union and had come back, feeling, in the words with which the late Lincoln Steffens glowingly reported a similar experience to Woodrow Wilson: “I have seen the future and it works.” Nearing had also attended the Pan-Asiatic congress, organized in Baku by the Communists shortly after the Russian Revolution, and had caught the first streaks of the revolutionary dawn roaring up from the East thirty years before it roared through China and into Korea. Presently he joined the American Communist Party. But he soon left it. He had a good, plain, uncomplicated mind; the theoretical subtleties of Marx and the tactical flexibilities of Lenin were foreign to it. He was an extreme individualist, with a stubborn streak and used to getting his own way; party discipline irked him. Moreover, he was simple and sincere, and the low-level factionalism of the Communist leaders revolted him. He was in fact his own species of Christian socialist, moved primarily by pacifism. He presently retired to a Vermont farm from which he issued to give lectures on the sad state of the world when not growing evergreens for the Christmas trade.

  Nearing’s students in social revolution were not predominantly Communist, either. There were two or three suburban spinsters and two or three unattached younger women. Most of them were engrossed less by the law of social revolution than by Nearing. There were two or three socialists or liberals. I can no longer remember even what those people looked like. But there was also an infiltration of Communists who really ran the class, steered the discussions and whose purpose it was to make the law of social revolution a Marxian law. Besides Sam and Carol Krieger, there were my old comrades Eve Chambers and her husband, David Benjamin, and one Jack Hardy whose real name was Dale Zysman.5 He was a physical education instructor in the New York schools.

  I never took the law of social revolution with a proper seriousness. The discussions were extremely dull and rambling, and nothing that I heard in the class has stayed in my mind as vividly as my memory of Scott Nearing conducting it. Like many American radicals, Nearing had very strong views about diet, leaning heavily towards small grains and berries, and holding, if I remember rightly, that meat was toxic. He would sit or stand in front of the social revolutionists, from time to time slapping into his mouth and chewing with audible energy handfuls of whole oats which he poured from a candy bottle that he always carried with him.

  Most of the revolutions had been shared out before I joined the class. But the Hungarian Revolution of 1919 was still unclaimed, chiefly because most of the source material on it was in German. This revolution was assigned to me. I did a good deal of research in the subject and acquired a fairly firm grasp of the history of the Hungarian Soviet and the part played in it by Bela Kun and other Communists, and by the Socialists who had invited the Communists to take over the government which they shared with them. But I never wrote up my findings. The Law of Social Revolution appeared (in bright red paper covers) without benefit of the Hungarian Revolution. I made an effort to read the book, but decided at last that the world revolution would probably take place before I discovered what the law of social revolution was.

  The class in social revolution led to two unexpected developments. One concerned the Kriegers. From the first, I had disliked Jack Hardy, who was both dull and bumptious. But I kept meeting him on my visits to Yonkers. For he and Carol Krieger were collaborating on one phase of the law of social revolution, and were so absorbed in their researches that he was constantly around the Krieger household.

  One day, I found Sam Krieger fighting back his tears. Comrade Carol had run away with Comrade Hardy, taking the police dog, too, I believe. I never saw Carol again. Sam also dropped from sight soon after. In the Communist Party, it would have been thought unseemly for Sam to express any disapproval of what had happened. For sex was held to be merely functional and of little importance except as it might help or harm the party.

  But I had always felt that there were limits to Krieger’s Marxism. He was a broken man. Perhaps he asked the party to find him an assignment in some area less memory-haunted than Yonkers. I had never felt very friendly toward my glassy-eyed sponsor in the Communist Party, and I never asked what had become of him. In any case, it would have done little good. For Communists, I was presently to note without paying much attention to the fact, were always dropping out of sight, and questions about them were usually answered with a shrugging: “Don’t know.”

  The other development was of a very different kind.

  VII

  I did most of my reading about the Hungarian Revolution at my desk in the newspaper room of the New York Public Library. Among other books I read Class Struggles and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat in Hungary. Its author was Bela Szanto who had been assistant commissar for war in the Hungarian Soviet Government. Some years later, I was to see the commissar for war himself, Joseph Pogany. Under the name John Pepper, Joseph Pogany was the Communist International’s secret representative to the American Communist Party. But in those e
arly days, I did not know that there were such things as secret representatives.

  One night, when I was absorbed in Bela Szanto, I suddenly became aware that a little man had been standing beside me unnoticed for some moments. He was trying to read the title of my book, which was in German. He was short, dark, and dressed quietly with an air of extreme tidiness. His eyes were black, intelligent, friendly and fearless. But the expression of his face was odd; it was vigilant and yet it was withdrawn. He asked me in German what I was reading, and I told him. He asked me why, and I answered : “It interests me.” He smiled and began to talk about the cast of characters in the Hungarian Soviet, which I knew fairly well by then, but which he discussed as if they were familiar friends.

  He came back on other occasions to read the Budapest newspapers. We had several long talks, which were very helpful to me. It was the belief of my unknown friend that the Hungarian Soviet Government had fallen in large part because it had tried to keep the great landed estates intact, to turn them into collective farms, instead of dividing them among the peasants—a mistake that the Communist Party was careful never to make again. This, among other reasons, had caused peasant outbreaks—outbreaks which Tibor Szamuely, the half-demented head of the Hungarian secret police, had put down in person by stringing up the peasants to telephone poles. Their corpses were known as “Szamuely fruit.”

  One night my friend closed a conversation by saying: “Sie sind ein Kommunist, natürlich?-You are a Communist, of course?” “Natürlich,” I answered. He asked me if I would like to go home with him to continue our conversation. When we were on the street, he said: “You must not tell anyone that you know me or where I live.” He said it simply, without any mystery or affectation. But now he addressed me with the familiar “du,” which European Communists use to one another in sign of fellowship.