Witness

by Whittaker Chambers

  One day Tom O’Flaherty did not show up at the Daily Worker office. The revolution of the 20th century was over for him. He was dead, a pathetic exile from his country, his church and his world.

  Next to Comrade O’Flaherty sat Comrade Chambers. Behind me sat a man who, for good and sufficient reasons, I shall call simply Comrade Fowler. He was a Lovestoneite, high in party circles and deep in party intrigue. He was later to be a delegate from the American Communist Party to one of the world congresses of the Communist International.

  Unlike most of my colleagues, Comrade Fowler talked a great deal, and what he said was almost invariably venomous. From him I always learned the latest slanderous whispers in the party. But he was not simply a gossip monger. I had the impression that all life seemed to him clinically vile. I remember his reading me an obituary of some perfectly inoffensive public figure, and then snarling: “He probably died of a complication of foul diseases!” He was an epicure of social scandal and used to touch up what he read with details so solemnly and childishly obscene that it was difficult not to laugh at him.

  But Comrade Fowler was himself the victim of malevolent gossip. There was a persistent rumor in the party that he was a stool pigeon. It would not down, and may perhaps account for some of his own maliciousness. At last, the Central Committee handed down a verbal “directive” (that word, borowed from the Russian Communists, had not yet mysteriously become a part of American bureaucratic patter) that the incident on which the rumor was based had taken place at the command of the party, and that anyone repeating the rumor was to be expelled forthwith. Comrade Fowler, I am told, has long ceased to be a member of the Communist Party.

  Next to Comrade Fowler sat a young man whom I shall call Comrade Cecil Haddock. He was the Daily Worker’s labor reporter, and extremely proud of the fact that he was a charter member of the Communist Party. But he left the party many years ago. I believe that he also turned out to be an “incurable right-wing deviationist.”

  What I chiefly remember about Comrade Haddock is that, late one night, he rushed into the big back room behind the editorial office. There the cartoonist, Fred Ellis, worked and party literature was stacked. Comrade Haddock was palpitant and his eyes were starting out of his head. His mouth hung open, his lips quivered and it was a moment before he could gasp: “Angelica ... Angelica . . . And Louis (Comrade Engdahl ) . . . . In the office. . . .” After that he passed into babbling.

  The comrades tiptoed to the editorial office door, for, in matters of sex, Communists, who deny that it has any importance, are invariably as prurient as gutter urchins. To their wild delight, all that Comrade Haddock had said was true. The story enlivened the party for months.

  XI

  I have drawn an ugly picture. It would scarcely be possible to exaggerate it. But this, too, must be said: However unpleasant the Communists on the Daily Worker might be as human beings, there was not one of them who did not hold his convictions with a fanatical faith; and there was scarcely one of them who was not prepared to die, at need, for them. That gave them a force.

  Moreover, I have described the Daily Worker as I first knew it, when it was at its worst. A change was about to set in. It was embodied in men like Harry Freeman, who was writing foreign news, and Sender Garlin, who, after a period of sharing his services with the Bronx Home News, had joined the Daily Worker staff as a full-time writer just before I did. But like me, they were little more than cubs in those early days, and did not begin to play a part until a little later.

  There were also certain figures whose relationship to the Daily Worker was rather erratic or mysterious, and who wandered in and out of that little universe, like comets, at unpredictable intervals. One of them passed through the office one day, trailing an air of self-conscious mystery. He was a slight, little man in a cap that did not go at all with his somewhat mournful face and small mustache. He tiptoed in and stood silently, looking over everyone’s shoulder for a few moments, in the manner of an inspector general. He did not greet anyone. Later, I asked who he was and was told: “Earl Browder. He’s just back from China.” For, like Harrison George, who was then his brother-in-law, Browder had been a Comintern agent in the Far East. It was the first of my only two glimpses of the former typewriter repairman from Kansas and later secretary of the American Communist Party (now expelled).

  Another native American also nested briefly in the Worker office. He was a lean, young fellow in his twenties, also self-consciously mysterious and self-important. He arrived amidst warnings that his presence was never to be mentioned. I cannot remember whether or not he ever had any name. He spent his days working with several file drawers of metal addressograph tags, which, I presently learned, were the names of men in the United States armed services. Just what he was doing with them I do not know. He soon went his unquiet ways.

  Still another mysterious visitor was a man called Robert Mitchell. He was a sturdy, bald Communist with a plain, pleasant face, which had a disturbing way of hardening into an expression that seemed cunning and brutal. I soon learned that his real name was John Sherman, that he was then engaged in secretly organizing a strike of New York subway workers. He was in the Daily Worker office to write stories about them. His presence, too, was never to be mentioned.

  I became very friendly with Sherman. Like me, he loathed the factional wrangle and felt that it was base and wasteful of energy, and he was unusually forthright in criticizing the august party leaders. He was the first man I had met in the party of whom I felt unqualifiedly: he is a revolutionist. After the subway strike, Sherman remained to write as a member of the Daily Worker staff, and I came to know him even better. For good or ill, he was to play a more important part in my life than almost any other human being I would ever know.

  Two staff members of the Daily Worker managed to live a little apart from the editorial zoo. One was Bert Miller, the business manager. The other was Fred Ellis, the cartoonist. Fred Ellis was a plain, unpretentious man with very blue, childlike eyes and a quiet, unaccented American sense of humor—that is, it was dry, and dealt in the unexpected and absurd. Fred could spot any sham at a glance and skewer it at a thrust. He was a foundling and had never known who his parents were. He told me one day how moved he had been at the birth of his child, who was the first family of his own blood he had ever known, so that he no longer felt himself to be a man absolutely alone in the world.

  Ellis had begun as a sign painter in Illinois (he was as Midwest as corn) and had become a very good cartoonist. But he was not particularly political, and, as a political cartoonist, he suffered from a serious handicap—a lack of political ideas. Quite by chance one day, we discovered that I, who could not draw at all, could think up cartoon ideas with little effort. As long as we were on the Worker together, I pinch hit as Fred’s idea man.

  In those days Bert Miller was a harassed soul. As business manager of the Daily Worker, the future research director of the House Committee on Un-American Activities had to meet a weekly payroll and find money to pay the paper, print and other bills. Money was very hard to find and his life was a weekly crisis. Thus, my chief recollection of Bert Miller from the past is less as a face than as a weary plaint: money.

  Bert suffered other grievances too. In his business office, he presided over a number of young women Communists, one of whom was a remarkably pretty Hungarian girl. He often protested that his girls were terrified to walk through the Daily Worker office (as they sometimes had to do) because, while they wriggled their way past the crowded chairs, each of the editors in turn reached back and pinched them.

  XII

  I had not joined the Daily Worker staff simply to become a news writer or even because I was particularly interested in writing news. I joined it because it offered me the most obvious base from which to work as a Communist.

  In looking around for ways to do this, I found them in an unexpected place and one that did not interest my colleagues at all, so that I had a completely free hand in the matter. Somewhere, in
the past, I had read that Lenin attached the greatest importance to “worker correspondence”—the letters which simple workers in the shops, or soldiers and sailors in the services, or peasants, voluntarily wrote to the party. Those letters were filled with grievances, specific accounts of working conditions and wage conditions, suggestions for elementary organization. This was the arterial flow between the working class and the Communist Party that could feed each with the purpose of the other.

  In the Daily Worker office this flow was completely blocked. Scores of such letters reached the paper, and lay, unanswered, gathering dust in heaps until they were swept into a trash basket to make room for more. I first began to read them simply for their wonderfully fresh accounts of working-class conditions. Sometimes they were heartrending. A worker, unemployed and ill, after a lifetime of labor, would describe how it feels to lie unwanted and disabled on the human dump-heap of the modem world. Sometimes the writer would add: “I am sending you all I can spare, a dime.” For the Daily Worker, bad as it was, had given him something he found nowhere else: hope.

  I volunteered to answer these letters and to edit the best ones for publication in the Worker. My comrades knew what Lenin had said about worker correspondence. They readily agreed. I caught the smiles of wise amusement. It was an inglorious little chore that would keep me busy and keep me from writing news stories (Communist newsmen are competitive too), and the letters made useful boiler plate to plug those occasional gaps in the Daily Worker at make-up time.

  With the publication of the first letters, a dike broke. Letters poured in. My surprised comrades suddenly found themselves in touch with the force they lacked the simple humanity and revolutionary imagination to contact, but which, nevertheless, was the force they had at heart. The worker correspondence was like a sensitive antenna catching the least stirrings among the otherwise soundless masses. Long before the New Bedford and Fall River textile strikes broke out, around 1927, the worker correspondence had picked up the groundswell. Sometimes it picked up other things too. One of the most tireless worker correspondents turned out to be a stool pigeon in the Nash plant at Kenosha, Wisconsin.

  Every year, the Executive Committee of the Communist later-national sent from Moscow a critique of the successes and failures of the Daily Worker. There was seldom anything but failure to report, and the critiques were long, dull and depressing. The critique that arrived the year the worker correspondence began was read at a noon-hour staff conference. I cut it, characteristically, for, whether at the Daily Worker or at Time, staff conferences wearied me. When I returned to the office, I found my comrades united in a most unusual smile of welcome. Moscow had spoken. The Communist International had roundly damned all of the Daily Worker with a single exception. It saw in worker correspondence the first evidence that the paper had struck roots among the American working class. Suddenly, I had become the indispensable man. It was decided that I must have an assistant to help me with my immense task.

  Lenin had said: “The role of the Bolsheviks is patiently to explain.” I thought that the role of the Bolsheviks was also patiently to act. A man had only to act as a Communist, however humble, and the results, I then believed, would take care of themselves.

  XIII

  My assistant turned out to be Nathan Honig, who had slid into the Worker staff almost unnoticed. I first became aware of him when I found him arriving at the office before me in the morning. Sometimes we worked a half day together in the office before anybody else arrived. He was an odd-looking young man, with owlish, greenish eyes and a head that seemed to have been briefly pressed in a vise. His manner, too, was odd. He was given to deliberately irrelevant answers and rather staggering impudence, and he liked to play the idiot. Slowly, I perceived that, like many sporadically impudent people Honig was painfully shy. His idiocy was part of a defensive act. Actually, his judgment about problems and people was surprisingly shrewd and sound. Like Fred Ellis, he had a litmus reaction to sham, but unlike Fred, Honig was infuriated by it and instantly attacked it. He was honest, devoted and a tireless worker, and his sallies against the party bigwigs, factionalism and corruption made many of his colleagues wince. But they seldom ventured reprisals, for he had one great advantage. Unlike most of them, he was an authentic proletarian. He came of a working-class family in Bayonne, New Jersey, where his father was a cooper (a dying skill) at the Standard Oil Company’s works.

  This gave him a special license to criticize the party’s blunders, usually in the form of funny stories of which he had a fund. I remember one about a strike of oil workers in Bayonne. The party learned of it belatedly, but decided to try to wedge into the leadership. To address the strikers, it sent down the only proletarian available, a nervous young Hungarian from New York City. He stared out across the mass of hulking men packed into one of the big yards. “Comrades,” he said, “I bring you striking oil workers the support of twenty striking dental mechanics in New York.” The roar of laughter that greeted his words effectively shut the party out of the strike.

  In time, my original feeling about Honig changed into respect and then into esteem. When my responsibilities increased on the Worker, Honig was one man on whom I could rely and absolutely trust. I lost track of him after I went underground and never saw him again. But rumors reached me that Honig had been sent to Russia for special training, and that, as soon as he could return to the United States, he broke with the Communist Party and repudiated Communism.

  The worker correspondence also resulted in two other experiences: my first party editorship and my first contact with a party underground cell. As a result of New Bedford and Fall River textile strikes, the Communist Party organized the National Textile Workers Union. I was chosen by the Central Committee to co-edit the union paper, The Textile Worker, together with Michael Intrator (accent on the In). Intrator had also been taken onto the Daily Worker staff to cover the needle trades and other labor news. Until then he had been a fur worker and a good mechanic at his trade. He had been brought up on the lower East Side. He had a mind largely untrained and unschooled, but direct, forceful and supple, with an unerring ability to drive to the heart of any discussion or problem. He also had an endless intellectual curiosity. He first opened up to me the violent life of the needle trades, which, until then, had seemed to me more like a national minority than a trade-union movement. From him I first learned that the Communist Party employed gangsters against the fur bosses in certain strikes. From him I first learned how Communist union members would lead their own gangs of strikers into scab shops and in a few moments slash to pieces with their sharp hooked fur knives thousands of dollars worth of mink skins. Sometimes the Communists and their opponents fought pitched battles in the fur market, in one of which Intrator himself was stabbed, though he paid no attention to the wound until he collapsed from it.

  Intrator gave me a sense of the working class at its most intelligent and militant. He was, besides, simple, human, humorous. We became close friends. He was, in fact, the only close friend I ever had in the open Communist Party. Our friendship survived all the changes of our party lives and often important differences of political opinion and activity. In 1929, Intrator was expelled as a Lovestoneite. The party did everything to make it impossible for him to get or keep a job. At one time, the Communist terror in the fur market was such that he had to carry a revolver to defend himself. That was while I was in the underground. We still remained friends. No one pled with me more strongly than he to break with the Communist Party. No one supported me more loyally after I had broken with it. Distance and experience have separated us in the last decade, but we retain for each other the special friendship of those survivors who feel: we went through it together.

  The underground cell to which I referred was in the Johnson and Johnson factory at New Brunswick, New Jersey. I do not know who organized it. But, at one point, the party decided that, as worker-correspondence editor, I should be attached to the cell and attend its meetings.

  For that purpose,
I was introduced to Comrade Gertrude Haessler, a brisk, red-headed, somewhat leathery young woman, the sister of Carl Haessler, who was then, I believe, the head of the Federated Press. Gertrude Haessler was the wife of William Weinstone, Communist organizer of the New York-New Jersey district of the party.

  Comrade Haessler first drove me out to New Brunswick, past the J. and J. factory and the Rutgers campus, to the house of a workingman where the meeting was held. She seemed to have general supervision of its activities. There were seven or eight Communists in the secret cell. All worked for Johnson and Johnson. All were Hungarians. One of them had served in the Hungarian Red Army under Bela Kun.

  Few of them spoke much English and the meetings were conducted in Hungarian of which I know only a few words. I could not have attended more than four or five meetings of this cell. For the secret comrades presently decided to have Communist leaflets distributed at the factory gates by their children and others. The police picked up one or two of the children. Their mothers protested to their fathers. One comrade’s wife made him leave the party and the cell broke up.

  Before that disaster, Bert Miller had one night accompanied Comrade Haessler and me to New Brunswick. As we drove through the almost continuous industrial plant that extends from Jersey City to the Raritan River, Comrade Miller’s eyes began to glow. I had the impression that he had never been outside of New York City before. We passed one vast factory whose buildings stretched for blocks. Bert looked at it in awe and asked me what it was. “The Worthington Pump Company,” I told him. “We must get in here,” he said solemnly.