For the Stalinists had swept into power, proclaiming that this was “the third period”—an epoch that I never understood very well and soon gave up trying to understand. But I knew that, whereas in the past, we had lived in a period characterized by wars and revolutions, we now suddenly found ourselves in a period of revolutions and wars, which must, officially, occur in that order. The reverse order was heresy. That, I thought, is nonsense.
Socialists, who, in the past, had been taunted as “collaborators with capitalism” for reasons which, from a Communist position, made sound sense, had now become “social fascists,” which to me made no sense at all. “Is it not clear, comrades,” asked Comrade Stalin blandly, “that social democracy and fascism are twins? It seems to me that this is decidedly clear.” It did not then seem clear to me.
In the past, the Communist Party had struggled to form united fronts with almost any group that would tolerate it. That was one method of spreading its influence, especially in the trade unions. Now, the united front had become heresy and anybody advocating it was subject to expulsion. The “united front from below” had become the catch-phrase. Insofar as this meant anything, it meant that henceforth Communists would make united fronts only with the rank and file of any group against its official leaders. That, too, seemed to me nonsense, and so, indeed, it proved to be.
Arab outrages were occurring in Palestine. The Communist International chose that moment to call for the formation of a ‘Soviet Arabistan,” and to attack the Zionists. Day after day bludgeoning stories and editorials along this mad line appeared in the Daily Worker. Editing them seemed less like a peculiarly trying exercise in party discipline than horseplay in a mental home.
The whole party had embraced, to the point of hysteria, the conviction that a gigantic economic crisis was about to strike the United States (the boom was still on ), to be followed at once by a violent social revolution. In anticipation, the Young Communist League suddenly acquired a uniform—sleazy khaki blouses and red scarves. They devoted their free hours to military drill (with sticks). Very often I had to climb through masses of these martial young men and women on my way in and out of the Workers Center. For they had turned the lower hall into a kind of bivouac, where they sprawled in picturesque attitudes, practicing a useful revolutionary skill-how to plait nooses. It seemed to me that the party, of which it had been said in Lenin’s time that it peopled the jails of Europe with philosophers, had simply gone insane. I was sure of it when one of the members of the Daily Worker staff rushed breathlessly into the office one day, shouting: “It’s begun. The masses are storming the Amalgamated Bank.” The insurrection on the far side of Union Square turned out to be a large group of needle-trades workers engaged in one of their usual sidewalk congresses. I was even more sure of it when Robert Minor tore out to the copy desk one day and slapped his hand upon a small news item that reported a small riot somewhere in rural Minnesota. “It’s the beginning of the American revolution,” he cried, “we must play it up big.”
Of course, the party had not gone insane at all, though some of its members were momentarily weaving along the brink. The inducement of that kind of hysteria is one of the techniques of fascism, but we knew less about fascism in those days than we do now —though perhaps not much less. It must also be pointed out that the party was quite right about the economic crisis, and just as wrong about the violence of the ensuing revolution.
My doubts and disagreements, swelling within me like an abscess, were brought to a head in an unexpected way. The Daily Worker had acquired a new writer in the person of Harrison George, the brother-in-law of Earl Browder, who, it was beginning to appear, would nose out William Z. Foster as leader of the party. Harrison George was a middle-aged, middle-class American revolutionist of many years of activity. He was a former I.W.W. It was he who had indiscreetly broadcast in Moscow that his friend, Vern Smith, while editing the I.W.W. central organ, was secretly a Communist. It was Harrison George, too, who had shouted that the masses were storming the Amalgamated Bank.
George and I had once briefly taken part in a strike at the Michelin tire factory, in Milltown, New Jersey. While we were waiting for the police to beat us up, he told me how, together with Earl Browder, he had been a Comintern agent in China. He had been in Canton during the abortive Communist uprising in 1927. From his hotel window, he had watched as the Nationalist troops nosed their machine guns through the windows of a bank opposite and mowed down the Communists inside.
Harrison was a mischievous man whom I at once spotted as a troublemaker. But we got along pleasantly, and he sometimes whispered information to me that was helpful in those dislocated days. He was a somewhat formidable figure in Stalinist circles. He was also the determined enemy of Robert Minor.
One day he sidled up to me confidentially and said: “We’d get that old fool Minor off this paper in a minute if it would not give ammunition to the Lovestoneites.” Those few sneering words, and the malevolent chuckle that went with them, were the drops that overflowed my mind and filled me with a mixture of chilling anger and despair. I thought: “The pigmies have taken over.” No doubt, Minor was, in some ways, an “old fool.” He was, in other ways, a gifted man, and, in my book, gifted men have a right to be old fools at times, and usually avail themselves of it, for their minds run along slightly different tracks to the mass of men, and at the best must seem a little odd.
I walked into Minor’s office and closed the door. “Bob,” I said, “I’d like to go away for a while. For a long time, I’ve been upset about what has been happening in the party. I can’t seem to find my way in the new policies. I want you to let me go off for a month by myself and try to think things through. Until I do, I can’t really edit the Daily Worker.”
Minor was hard of hearing but often pretended to be quite deaf. Whenever he heard anything he did not want to hear, he would invariably cup his ear with his hand, affect an expression of tortured attention, and ask: “What did you say, com-rade?” He tried this on me now. I repeated what I had said.
“Oh, you’re just tired,” he said. “You’ve been working too hard. We can’t spare you, not now. (I knew he was thinking that Honig and I were the only two men he could trust not to knife him.) There is nothing happening in the party. Everything is all right now. We are all comrades together.”
“We are so much comrades together, Bob,” I said, “that they’re after your scalp this minute.” Then I repeated what Harrison George had just said to me.
Minor jumped out of his chair, red in the face, as he often became, and frightened. “Who told you that?” he shouted. I said that I was sorry, but I could not tell him.
“You must tell me, com-rade,” he said. “I must know.” I absolutely refused to tell. He stared at me out of his little elephant’s eyes, now filled with anger and fright. I got up and left him.
I knew exactly what “the old fool” was going to do. He was going to the Central Control Commission to force me to tell. I also knew that I would not tell.
XXVII
Nevertheless, I was not quite prepared, when I walked into the Daily Worker office early the next afternoon, to find a stranger sitting at my place in the slot. But I knew at a glance what had happened. I had become “a politically unreliable element.” Grateful Bob Minor, to demonstrate his new-found loyalty to the new overlords, had decided to make a political offering of me. He had warned them that I had doubts, that I had said that I was no longer able to edit the Daily Worker. I was not angry with him. But I was sorry that he should have let himself be less than he was, especially in truckling to men who were so much less than he.
The stranger at the copy desk turned out to be Nat Kaplan, a young Communist, who, if I remember rightly, had just returned from the Soviet Union. (Under another name, he was later to be employed by the C.I.O. Auto Workers Union. ) Minor instructed me coldly to teach Kaplan my job. “Because you are overworked and need assistance,” said that childish hypocrite.
Kaplan was restrained, s
elf-consciously pleasant and very alert, exactly in the manner of any detective who hopes to elicit all possible information from a man before he arrests him. We worked together quietly through the afternoon. I showed him just what to do. He was quick and bright. In the office there was the stiff silence that usually enveloped those unhappy occurrences. No one spoke to me if he could help it.
Presently, the telephone rang. It was the call I had been expecting. “This is Charles A. Dirba,” said a deliberately chilling voice. “Comrade, I would like to talk to you. Tonight.” Dirba was the chairman of the Central Control Commission.
When I went down to supper, I left Comrade Kaplan sitting at the copy desk. It was my last impression of the Daily Worker office. I ate alone, for I had certain decisions to make. About two things I was determined. I was not going to betray Harrison George to the Control Commission. I was all the more determined in view of the way that Minor had betrayed me. There had been enough denunciations in the Communist Party. I was not going to add one more to the heap. Neither was I going to be put through an act before the Central Control Commission. From me, there would be no obscene confessions of political error, no public prostration or phony repentance. I had never asked the party for anything but the right to serve it. Clearly, it no longer needed my services.
I knew that I was putting myself outside the Communist Party. But if a man could remain within the party only by abasing himself, he and the party were bettet off if he got out. “But all that will change,” I thought. “For the moment, the party has ceased to be a Communist Party. It is only temporarily deranged. It will have to come to its senses, or it will cease to be party at all. Meanwhile, I will wait until it does.”
There was no point in returning to the Daily Worker office. I never went back.
XXVIII
I was outside the Communist Party, but not out of it. For during the two years I remained outside it, the party never expelled me. I still considered myself a Communist. I had broken with the Communist Party not because of differences in theory, but over problems of political strategy and tactics and the problem of the conduct of Communists within the party, which was, ultimately, a problem of organization. I was an independent Communist oppositionist.
Communists were strictly forbidden to fraternize with oppositionists of any kind. Some Communists pointedly cut me when we met on the street or in restaurants. Others remained as friendly as before. Among these was Jacob Burck, an extremely able artist who had succeeded Fred Ellis as the Daily Worker cartoonist ( Ellis had gone to Moscow to draw cartoons for the Russian trade-union paper, Trud). In those days I spent much time at Burck’s big studio on West 14th Street.
Several times the party sent me letters, sternly summoning me to stand trial before the Central Control Commission. These summonses always came by registered mail. I always signed for the letters so the party would be in no doubt that I had received them.
Later on, the party took to sending around its agents to feel out my state of mind. Usually, they brought small pieces of bait. One said that the party wanted me to sit on a committee which the Central Committee was setting up to develop worker correspondence on a national scale. Another asked me to translate the two volumes of an important study of Chinese agrarian problems by Karl Wittvogel (now an anti-Communist). But the party’s agent, a young Harvard or Yale man whose name I have forgotten, grew so angry discussing Communist problems with me that he lost control of his voice and his temper together and rushed off, taking the volumes of Wittvogel with him.
It would have been a privilege to translate Wittvogel. But, like all party translating, it would have been an unpaid pleasure. I could scarcely afford that any longer. I had gone back to translating for a livelihood. Soon I had all the work I could handle, and, for the first time in years, was making a living.
One of the books I translated at that time was Franz Werfel’s novel, Class Reunion. It was less a novel than an elongated short story. It related how an Austrian attorney supposed that he saw in a prisoner coming up for examination a classmate who, out of jealousy, he had managed to ruin in their youth. Most of the book was a flashback which described the trivial stages of that ruin ( one of them, if I remember rightly, consisted in the bad boy’s leading on the good boy to stuff himself with tarts). At the time, the novel seemed to me tiresome and overcontrived. It was one of what I call “unnecessary books”—books, that, for any bearing they have on man’s mind, man’s fate, or even his entertainment, might as well never have been written. Apparently, readers thought so, too, for Class Reunion was not a great success. I soon forgot the details of its story, with which, in any case, I had nothing to do but the tiresome labor of translation. I should probably never have remembered them, but for the Hiss Case.
For in Class Reunion, Dr. Carl Binger, the psychologist in the Hiss trials, undertook to discover the psychological clue to Chambers’ “mysterious motives” in charging that Alger Hiss had once been a Communist. Chambers was the bad boy and Hiss was the good boy of Class Reunion, and the novel, unread by me for some twenty years, had put the idea of ruining Hiss in my mind—why I never quite understood, since it always seemed to me that if I had been bent on ruining Alger Hiss from base motives, the idea might well have occurred to me without benefit of Franz Werfel. But to many enlightened minds Class Reunion became a book of revelation.
I have always held that anyone who takes the trouble to read Class Reunion without having made up his mind in advance, can scarcely fail to see that, if there are any similarities at all between the characters, it is Hiss who superficially resembles the bad boy and Chambers who superficially resembles his victim.
XXIX
I had failed as an organization Communist. For all the influence I could have on the actions of the Communist Party or its thinking, I might just as well never have worked on the Daily Worker. I had never sought to influence policy. But now Communist policy must be influenced. For the economic crisis had begun in the United States. The stock market had crashed. In the cities, the breadlines were forming. In the countryside, they were selling up the farms for debts. To masses of men and women stunned by this turn of history, as completely as elsewhere they would be later stunned by bomb blast, the Communist Party could only iterate “third period,” while it tried to turn the economic psychosis into premature and irresponsible violence.
It occurred to me that there was another way than politics to influence policy. I might try writing, not political polemics which few people ever wanted to read, but stories that anybody might want to read—stories in which the correct conduct of the Communist would be shown in action and without political comment. While I was brooding on this, a small group of Midwestern farmers raided some stores for food. I had been brought up in a country village close to the land. I thought that I knew exactly what had happened. All that I wanted to say fell into place at one stroke in my mind. I wrote through one night and by morning had completed a rather long short story. It was about a farmers’ rising in the West and the part played in it by an intelligent Communist.
For the Communist, I drew on my memories of that old Kansas wheat farmer and former secretary of the Communist Party, Louis Katterfeld
I took the story to Walt Carmon, a former seaman turned Bohemian, who was editing the New Masses, the Communist controlled literary monthly. He was editing it for much the same reasons that I had edited the Daily Worker—because the nominal editors were seldom around. Carmon liked the story which he called: Can You Hear Their Voices? A Communist group, headed by William Gropper, the Daily Worker cartoonist, protested that I was a renegade, but the story appeared in the New Masses.
It had a success far beyond anything that it pretended to be. It was timely. The New York World-Telegram spotted it at once and wrote a piece about it. International Publishers, the official Communist publishing house, issued it as a pamphlet. Lincoln Steffens hailed it in an effusion that can be read in his collected letters. Hallie Flanagan, then head of Vassar’s Experimental Th
eater, turned it into a play. In a few months, the little story had been translated even into Chinese and Japanese and was being played in workers’ theaters all over the world.
Can You Hear Their Voices? dealt with Communism in action. I wanted to deal with other aspects of the problem. In quick succession, I wrote three more stories which the New Masses published as fast as I finished them. You Have Seen the Heads dealt with the problem of defeat. It was a story of the Chinese civil war, which the Communists had been losing for years. It ended: “We were defeated at Han-Io. We were defeated at Chen-chow. The last was our eleventh defeat without a victory. We are harried among mountains. The road to victory is up the sharp sides of mountains.” A Chinese Communist later assured me that I could not possibly have written the story “because only Chinese think like that.”
Our Comrade Munn dealt with the problem of the conduct of the Communist within the party. It merely reported the life and death of an obscure Communist, such a man as I had sought to be myself. It was almost as successful as Can You Hear Their Voices? and, like it, was translated, dramatized and played in Europe and Asia. The Death of the Communists, the last of the four little stories, dealt with the problem of the Communist in the presence of death. It described the last hours of a group of Communists in the prison where they had been taken to be shot. It was reported through the eyes of a cynical fellow prisoner who, only when the execution was over, sensed that he had been touched by something new in his experience—the moral force of men who were prepared to die for what they believed.
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