by Studs Terkel
It was in the second half of the Thirties that a big change occurred in the American Left. There was the New Deal and especially the birth of the CIO. Labor entered politics, as the unorganized were organized. Radicals of all persuasion were deeply affected. The Communists and the Socialists, because of their experience, were virtually sucked into the movement. In many cases, they were the moving forces.
With the rise of Hitler and the Spanish resistance to fascism in the Civil War, a most decisive event followed. A radical turnabout in Communist policy. The People’s Front—the United Front—came into being. The Party abandoned the theory of “social fascism.” The United Front welcomed all radicals, all liberals and, for that matter, all “right-thinking” capitalists. (Laughs.) Everybody. The New Deal and Roosevelt were embraced. Speeches called for understanding of the National Association of Manufacturers. Had any radical suggested these ideas in preceding decades, he’d have been politically lynched. There were only two prerequisites: friendliness to Russia and hostility to Hitler.
As far as the Communist Party was concerned, it was quite effective. Certainly, unity among radicals is better than internal strife. It was the party of friendliness. How could anybody oppose it? You’d have to be against motherhood….
Soon, the policy of working in the Democratic Party became accepted. This was natural. The labor movement was overwhelmingly behind Roosevelt and the New Deal. It wasn’t a matter of taking it over. I don’t believe all this right-wing nonsense about their capturing the Democratic Party. It was merely a matter of influence. In comparison with its utter isolation in the first half of the Thirties, this was an enormous advance for the Communists. But it was all an illusion. Its Achilles’ heel was its subordination to Moscow policy.
The Party had been doing fine. It was against fascism, for the Loyalist government in Spain, for the CIO, for all the nice things in the New Deal. What the hell more do you want from a radical party? There’s never been anything as nice as this in American history. (Laughs.) Then, virtually overnight, it destroyed itself. It backed the Hitler-Stalin pact.
The shock was volcanic. The labor movement drove them out of its ranks. It lost liberal support. It was reduced to insignificance. At the end of the decade, the CP appeared far more discredited, far more isolated than at the beginning of the Thirties. And from that, it has never recovered.
There was a burst of respectability with the invasion of Russia by Hitler. Once again, radical and liberal intellectuals flocked to its banner. But it was a brief moment. Then came the Cold War…. Today, even the New Left looks upon it as obsolete, puritanical, conservative, establishment….
It’s funny, if it weren’t so tragic. It’s sad because of its effect on a genuine American radical movement. It looked for a moment, at the beginning, that it might become that. It never did.
The decline of the Socialist Party is even more regrettable. Especially to me. For the past ten years, I’ve been a member. This party did not understand—and now is only beginning to understand—the profound political revolution wrought by Roosevelt and the New Deal.
A new political coalition was created: labor, with its many ethnic minorities and Negroes. At first it was sentiment on the part of the blacks; now it is organized. I’m convinced this coalition is going to remain a decisive element in American politics for a long time to come.
This coalition worked. It did not produce socialism, but then that wasn’t Roosevelt’s intention. (Laughs). He saved our society in a new bourgeois reform way. I hate to use this jargon, but there you have it. Capitalism remains.
So the Socialist vote continues to decline. The enormous sympathies it once enjoyed in the labor movement has thinned down to nothing. The Communists, because of Moscow, are ruined. The American Left is nothing as compared to its role in European countries. Nothing breaks my heart more than to say this: our stupidity in not recognizing the significance of the coalition, our failure to identify with this group, our isolation from the mainstream of American political thought, our special language, which no one understands. It’s a pity.
I don’t expect our power structure to build a radical movement. I expect the radicals to do that. Up to now, they have failed. As I watch the New Left, I simply weep. If somebody set out to take the errors and stupidities of the Old Left and multiplied them to the nth degree, you would have the New Left of today….
The radicals of the Thirties have gone their separate way. Only a handful retain their old commitments. I feel more strongly about the ideals of socialism than I ever did. Still, many thousands of old radicals, like myself, vote for the goddam Democrats. And yet, as I look back on that decade, the Thirties, it was for radicals the most exciting period in American history.
Dorothy Day
The headquarters of The Catholic Worker: it is on the Lower East Side in New York. On a wall of the kitchen—an all-purpose room of “any peasant’s lodging,” as a young man says—is a framed quotation of Father Daniel Berrigan: “Men are called to declare peace as once they were called to declare war.”
Her room, two fights up, is bare of any luxury. A cot, a couple of chairs, a shelf of well-thumbed books, including a great many paperbacks. There are occasional interruptions by young associates—questions of the moment : the putting up of a stray couple; an unexpected visitor will I share their meal? Nothing fancy, but filling….
She is a large-boned, handsome woman. Though a white-haired grandmother, touching seventy, her demeanor is that of a young, exhilarated girl. An intimation of weariness is now and then reflected. It passes quickly.
“My approach even as a child was religious. Some of my old friends from the Communist Party felt I was too religious to be really a good revolutionist. Pacifism was very much my whole point of view. I never could see a set of people killing off another set of people to bring a better society. People had to work nonviolently. I don’t think I was especially influenced by Gandhi. I think it’s the whole Christian message.
“My whole background before, as a Socialist and a Communist, was that things should be changed. There’s always going to be human suffering, plain human orneriness. But it seemed impossible to me that we should be living with these extremes of wealth and poverty, where people lived like dogs and got nowhere.”
IN DECEMBER, 1932, I was covering the hunger march, down in Washington, of the Unemployed Councils. And a farmers convention which was more or less Communist-inspired. I went down there to cover it for Commonweal and America.131 I just sat in that shrine and prayed that a way would open up for me to work more directly with these issues. My prayer was obviously a fervent one. That was the year I met Peter Maurin. That was the year The Catholic Worker started.
She tells of Peter Maurin, the French peasant, who chose poverty as a way of life; a former teacher, he came to Chicago’s Skid Row; worked the railroads, the wheat fields, the steel mills; was a janitor; engaged in all sorts of manual labor: “the man who digs the ditches, the man who cleans the sewers deserves just as much pay as the man who sits behind the desk….” All reform, he believed, must come from the bottom up, not from the top down. His belief was in a “personalist communitarian revolution.” It begins with the individual and his personal response to poverty….
Ours is more the anarchist’s point of view: the State is a tremendous danger. We were the first ones in the Church to oppose Mussolini and Hitler. We picketed the Bremen,132 I remember, down there on the waterfront. The Communists were picketing at the same time. The Communists and the Catholics….
It must have been in 1935. A group of Communists boarded the ship and tore down the swastika. Some of them were arrested, and one was shot. We were, both sides, issuing leaflets. Although atheism is an integral part of Marxism, according to Lenin, we still had these concordances….
We joined them in a protest in front of the police station. We were dispersed by the police. When the Communists who were arrested were brought to trial, they proclaimed themselves Catholic workers. Most of th
em were longshoremen and they were Catholics, by birth. Cradle Catholics. It was amazing to hear them all get up and say they were Catholic workers. (Laughs.) Right away, they were identified with us. I found it very amusing.
We participated in the strikes that were going on. I remember a brewery strike. Why we picketed a brewery I don’t know. (Laughs.) I’m practically a Carrie Nation about liquor. You see so much misery on the Bowery, you just have to carry on…. There was a department store strike. I guess we were the first Catholics policemen had ever seen on a picket line. They thought we were all Communists boring from within.
There was the Chinese-Japanese War going on that we started in 1932 or 1933. Then there was the Ethiopian War and the Spanish Civil War. Nonviolence had to be the role of the Church. How else could any one speak of the teachings of Christ, the Sermon on the Mount, the whole question of the Beatitudes … ?
Plenty of students came down and joined us, ’cause there were no jobs to be gotten. They came directly from college, with no experience. Mostly young men. That’s what really began building up the Worker. We had thirty-two hospitality houses in the country before we were many years old.
There’s a wide difference in point of view of the students then and young people today. State universities were cheap in those days. You could go to a state university and get yourself a degree easily enough. But there were no jobs. Now there are plenty of jobs and most young people are wondering what’s worth doing. They don’t want to be part of the system. The war hangs over their heads, the Bomb. They have a sense of constant crisis.
In the Thirties, bread and butter issues …
Yes. They didn’t consider the whole social order as students are doing today. Or the whole peace issue …
In 1933, 1934, there were so many evictions on the East Side, you couldn’t walk down the streets without seeing furniture on the sidewalk. We used to go ahead and try to find other empty apartments and force the relief stations to pay those first months’ rent. We used to help people move into the apartments and get settled. And give them a hand.
Did you, like the Unemployed Councils, try to put people back in the apartments from which they were evicted?
No. We felt we couldn’t use people in this way, to make a point. We tried to forestall the marshal, and get them moved out, so they wouldn’t be ashamed and humiliated and debased. They had enough suffering without having this suffering piled on them, being made part of a demonstration.
What was the attitude of the Communist Party toward The Catholic Worker?
There were a few articles in The Daily Worker trying to combat our ideas. They considered it false mysticism. There was no contact between us, except that some were friends of mine…. When it came to a certain kind of strike or to a demonstration, such as the one in front of the German Embassy, there was a common cause.
We were never militantly anti-Communist. But we saw so many liberals going over in the Thirties, we had to put out the very strong differences in point of view. In a way, they were not to be depended upon. They could change their party line, it was the style, sort of. At the same time I can see what Cuba’s accomplishing. I think every single Latin-American country will have another brand of Communism. The Church could be a Communist organization.
The Communists contributed plenty in the Thirties. Absolutely. They were the ones that led the heroic struggles and risked beatings and imprisonment and death itself to organize in the South, for instance, in textiles. They tried to organize the unorganized, wherever they were.
That hunger march down in Washington emphasized the need for all the things we have now. They were marching on Washington, three thousand of them, for unemployment insurance, old age pensions, aid to dependent children. Every type of social security that we have now was on the Communist program at that time. But this was the philosophy of the State taking over.
Did you campaign for Social Security at the time?
No, we were on the other side. The whole program of unemployment insurance, Social Security, was a confession of the failure of our whole social order. And confession of failure of Christian principles: that man, in fact, did not look after his brother. That he had to go to the State …
There’s a terrific conflict here. The Federal Government again and again has to protect people against injustices—in the South, for instance. And yet, ideally, it should not be the business of the State. Popes and anarchists have emphasized the principle: subsidiarity. The State should never take over the functions that could be performed by a smaller body. The State should only enter when there are grave abuses. The Tennessee Valley Authority is a good case in point. It concerns the welfare of a great many people in a great many states. And begins a new social order right there—a communal order, to a great extent, autonomous.
The relation of The Catholic Worker to the New Deal … ?
We were against it. On the one hand, we had to go ahead. It was a time of crisis, as a flood would be. So we did try to get the people on welfare. Did try to get their rent taken care of. But what you had to do first of all is to do everything you could.
You were not opposed to the reform measures of the New Deal, per se?
No. But if it could be done by a smaller group, it would be better. We see the evils of gigantic associations. Their abuse of power. There must be decentralization. It’s a tremendous problem. Autonomy as against immediate need. We emphasize our anarchism.
What do I do? That’s how our houses of hospitality started during the Depression. A girl came in. She had read a letter we sent to the bishops about the Church’s tradition. She had been evicted from her furnished room. She had a couple of shopping bags and was sleeping in the subway. We didn’t have any room, we were all filled up. We didn’t know of any place that could take her. The girl looks at us and says: “Why do you write about things like that when you can’t do anything about it?” It shamed us, you know? We went and rented another apartment. Then we got a whole house. We were pushed into it. Everything we’ve done, we’ve been pushed into.
We never started a bread line. We didn’t intend to have a bread line or a soup line come to the door. During the Seamen’s Strike of 1937, six of them showed up. They said: “We’re on strike, we have no place to stay, we have no food. We’re sleeping in a loft on the waterfront.” We took in about ten seamen. We rented a storefront, while the strike lasted for three months. We had big tubs of cottage cheese and peanut butter, and bread by the ton brought in. They could make sandwiches all day and there was coffee on the stove.
While we were doing that for the seamen, one of the fellows on the Bowery said, “What the hell are you doing down there feeding the seamen ? What about the men on the Bowery? Nobody’s feeding them.” So when the men would come in for clothes or a pair of shoes or socks or a coat and we didn’t have any left, we’d say, “Sit down anyway and have a cup of coffee. And a sandwich.” We kept making more and more coffee. We brought out everything we had in the house to eat. That’s how the first bread line started. Pretty soon we had a thousand men coming in a day, during the Depression. It started simply because that Bowery guy got mad.
Our good Italian neighbors recognized poverty. They’d bring all their leftovers to add to the soup. Storekeepers and neighbors. They’d bring over pots of spaghetti and their leftover furniture and clothing and things like that. The very ones who were poor themselves. We lived in their neighborhood and they accepted us.
They were also the ones who had little statues of Mussolini in their windows and gave him their wedding rings.133 So you can’t go ahead and say these are the bad guys and these are the good guys. You can’t ever say it. They talk about the Left and the Right, yet all men are brothers. The Communists have a better understanding of this, but they want to bring it about through the use of force. Isn’t it a shame? They do have the vision. Would they wipe out these people with Mussolini in the window?
When we moved into a more respectable type neighborhood, they used to throw things a
t us when we passed by, saying we were degrading the neighborhood. As soon as people get a little more comfortable, this is what happens….
The attitude is much worse today. In the Thirties, everybody was in the same boat. It was a general disaster. Ignazio Silone once said, “Everybody’s disaster is nobody’s disaster.” The individual did not suffer as he does suffer now. Those on welfare today are despised as they were never despised before.
Another Depression might be a relief to many people. They know our prosperity is built on war. It might be so much better than war. People won’t have to keep up a front any longer. They wouldn’t have to keep up the payments any more. There would have to be a moratorium. The threat of Depression is nothing to worry about. I wish to goodness the stock market would collapse for good and for all. I’d like to see a nonviolent revolution take place and an end to this Holy War….
Fred Thompson
“I’m just as old as the century.” He is a member of the IWW (Industrial Workers of the World, popularly known as the Wobblies). He joined in 1922.
In his younger days, he had been a construction worker: tunnels, irrigation ditches, dams, quarries, laying track. “We always boxcared from one job to another, never paid any fare. I had heard of the Wobblies … weird stories, that they were a bunch of nuts trying to change the world by burning haystacks and stuff like that.
“I found a tremendous difference between this myth and the reality. They were a very serious bunch of men with understanding: even if we do win our immediate demands, the boss and I will still have a fight. Let’s run the works for our own good, so we won’t have to fight any more. They had this notion: someday … But, right now, let’s clean up these camps, let’s raise the wages.
