Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left
205
Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left
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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781893554054 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Encounter Books |
| Publication date: | 06/01/2001 |
| Pages: | 205 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.62(w) x 9.26(h) x (d) |
Read an Excerpt
Chapter One
Red Diapers
Ron Kovic, the radical Vietnam vet, claims sarcastically to have been born on the Fourth of July; I have always thought of myself—with growing irony—as having been born on the First of May. In a sense, the first step of my journey to America, a country where I was born but didn't fully discover until middle age, took place on May Day 1939. One of the photographs I have inherited shows me as a baby, one and a half years old, bundled in a stroller and about to be paraded down Fifth Avenue in the yearly Communist Party celebration that went through the garment center of the then radical needle trade unions, ending with a mass rally at Union Square—for decades the historic center of radical protest. That day, it seems to me, was my baptism into the world of Jewish radicalism, a world so small and insular that it existed inside a political and social ghetto. It is now a lost world, yet one well captured by the late Irving Howe in his classic book The World of Our Fathers.
I almost didn't enter that world at all. Those in charge of preparing for "the revolution" could not afford the frivolity of having children. And when my mother found in her late thirties that she was pregnant, it was an unexpected, and in some sense an alien event. My father had come from a large family and I had many cousins; but among their friends in "the movement," my parents were almost the only ones to have a child. Politics notwithstanding, they were devoted and loving parents who continually sought my best interests,whichsometimes meant shielding me from the movement's dark side.
My father, Reuben Radosh, was a milliner, having learned to design women's hats in turn-of-the-century Poland. Coming to the United States shortly before the outbreak of World War I, he was drafted into the U.S. Navy. After serving his stint, he quickly got a job at a millinery factory, where he became active in the hatters' union, officially known as the Hat, Cap and Millinery Workers of America, an American Federation of Labor craft affiliate. In that union, he became an activist in the radical caucus and served as a leader in one of the earliest Communist fronts, the Trade Union Unity League. The TUUL was an instrument set up by the Communist Party during the so-called "Third Period," when the Communist line spoke of imminent revolution and the party sought to move working-class militants out of the regular AFL unions and into a new, revolutionary trade union federation.
My father quickly became the TUUL's classic front man: a non-Communist who accepted party leadership, and who sought to get his fellow workers to split their union and move it under party control. He almost succeeded. The official history of the union, published in the 1960s, notes that in the late 1920s he ran for president of the union with one opponent, the moderate trade unionist Alex Rose. My father was more radical—and also more naïve. Ballots were supposed to be listed alphabetically. But before they were printed, Rose asked my father if it would be all right for him to put his name on the ballot first. Certain that he was going to win, my father immediately agreed. He didn't realize that in the community of immigrant workers, many who still could not read English voted for the first name they saw. And so my father's magnanimity led to his electoral loss, and to a lifetime of hard work in the city's hat factories instead of a desk job among the union bosses.
Rose fared much better. Those who grew up in New York City would later all know his name. A major power broker in Democratic Party circles, Rose broke up the third-ticket American Labor Party, which had become another front of the Communists at the onset of the Cold War, and he moved labor leaders who had created it a decade earlier out of its ranks and into a new body he created, the Liberal Party.
By the time of the Cold War, my father found that his past activity with the Reds had put him on the industry blacklist. Despite his reputation as a first-rate designer, firms were reluctant to hire him. He then did what scores of other blacklisted union activists close to the Communist Party did: he became a capitalist. He went into business with an old neighborhood friend whose cousin had owned one of the major hat firms in America. And in one of those strange quirks of history, my pro-Communist father ended up getting the contract for the official Eisenhower hats in the 1952 campaign, which he designed and which were created in the factory he now owned.
If such an event could happen only in America, the same was true of its sequel. By the 1960s, as fashion changed and few women wore hats, the industry declined and my father's firm, along with scores of others, went out of business. Alex Rose, whose strong anticommunism had long since moved him out of my father's circles, came to his rescue. Rose worked the books, allowing my father to obtain a union pension, although he had not worked as a union member for decades. It was, my father thought, Rose's way of thanking him for his naïve generosity so many years ago when he foolishly agreed to let his rival be listed first on the union electoral ticket.
My mother, Ida Radosh, née Kreichman, came from Russia with her family at an early age and lived with her parents and sister and brothers in a one-room apartment in the swarming ghetto of the Lower East Side. In those days, few of her friends or family went past elementary school, and like so many other immigrant children, she had to leave school after the eighth grade to find a job. In 1913, at the age of thirteen, she transferred to the Hebrew Technical School for Girls, to be trained in techniques of factory work in the garment trades. There she learned how to be a cutter, a task left for female workers to perform, while the men got the machine jobs. At the age of twenty-three, after spending nearly half of her days working, my mother had the major experience of her young life when she got an opportunity to attend the Bryn Mawr summer school for working women. At this union-sponsored educational session on the campus of the elite institution, she finally got a sampling of education, taking courses in philosophy, history and science; and she had a chance to swim and play tennis. In later years, she would proudly show me the one term paper she ever wrote, an essay on anarchism.
It was in the garment trades, as a member of her local's executive board in the fledgling International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union led by David Dubinsky, that Ida Kreichman met my father. Their relationship was born in the meetings that surrounded major strikes in the 1920s. My father, who had participated in the 1924 general strike of millinery workers, was by then a prominent left-wing union activist. He and my mother were clearly made for each other. At the time they both lived in Williamsburgh, then a Jewish outpost of Brooklyn. Finding themselves at the same union meeting, they walked home together over the Brooklyn Bridge. Like so many other couples involved in the trade union and radical movements, their romance was framed by life and struggle in the movement.
My parents may have thought of themselves as working-class heroes, but for me the romantic figure in the family was my mother's cousin Jacob Abrams, a charismatic, handsome young militant in the Jewish anarchist movement in New York. By the time I was born, Abrams was living with his wife, Mary, in Mexico City, a haven for exiled revolutionaries from all over the world. We visited him there many times during my childhood. Abrams (we always called him by his last name) had made a bid for fame as a radical back on August 23, 1918, when he was arrested along with four of his comrades for distributing two leaflets protesting the American intervention in the fledgling Soviet Union, the so-called Siberian Expedition of 1918. By today's lights, the leaflet reads as if it came from another planet. It accused the United States government of generating "false, hypocritic [sic] military propaganda" and betraying the workers of Germany and Russia. The only response to the expedition, which aimed to "betray the splendid fighters of Russia," was to proclaim a general strike.
The leaflets, printed in Yiddish and broken English, and handed out on a single block in New York City, would hardly appear to threaten the nation's security. Yet Abrams and his comrades were arrested by the New York Bomb Squad, and after a trial that drew a great deal of attention, were found guilty of violating the Sedition Act of 1918, which forbade inflammatory antigovernment speech. They were handed twenty-year sentences for their crime. The Supreme Court upheld the conviction, but the case led to the single most important dissent issued by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, one that has become the basis of all subsequent First Amendment theory and litigation.
Justice Holmes argued that Congress "certainly cannot forbid all effort to change the mind of the country." Maintaining that even during war "the principle of the right to free speech is always the same," he concluded that only "the present danger of immediate evil," or a desire to bring such about, warranted restrictions on speech. "Now nobody can suppose that the surreptitious publishing of a silly leaflet by an unknown man," Holmes wrote of my cousin, "without more, would present any immediate danger that its opinions would hinder the success of the Government arms or have any appreciable tendency to do so." The prison terms, he argued, had "been imposed for the publishing of two leaflets that I believe the defendants had as much right to publish as the Government has to publish the Constitution of the United States now vainly invoked by them." What Holmes defended was not sympathy for their views, which he found silly and deplorable, but rather the "free trade in ideas" by which views get accepted or rejected in "the competition of the market." Thus, he concluded in much-quoted words, "we should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions we loathe and believe to be fraught with death, unless they so imminently threatened immediate interference with the lawful and pressing purposes of the law that an immediate check is required to save the country."
But that was the dissenting opinion; so Abrams began serving his sentence in a federal facility in Atlanta. After almost two years, the defendants were offered a commutation of their sentences, on condition that "they be deported to Russia and never return to the United States, or to require them to serve the sentences imposed." Thus, in June of 1922, Abrams and his wife sailed off to the still young revolutionary republic, the Soviet Union. But he quickly discovered that even then, the USSR was utopia lost. As the scholar of anarchism Paul Avrich has written, "by the Spring of 1918, the majority of anarchists had been sufficiently disillusioned with Lenin to seek a complete break, while the Bolsheviks, for their part, had begun to contemplate the suppression of their former allies, who had outlived their usefulness and so, from the start, the anarchists found themselves the first victims of the new secret police whose incessant criticisms were a nuisance the new regime no longer had to tolerate."
Any ties left between the anarchists and the Bolsheviks came to an end after the famed suppression by Trotsky's troops of the sailors' and workers' rebellion at Kronstadt in March of 1921. Emma Goldman, who had already left Russia by the time Abrams arrived, wrote to his counsel, "we missed your young clients who I fear will not be very grateful for having been taken out of Atlanta ... and sent to the Russian Penitentiary." Indeed, Abrams soon found that one of his codefendants who had joined him in the Russian exile, Mollie Steimer, had been arrested for "anarchist" activity by the GPU, the first incarnation of the KGB. Steimer was to write that the Bolsheviks had become "the most reactionary, most brutal and autocratic rulers, who care for nothing but the maintenance of their power." The censorship, secret police and concentration camps exceeded anything that existed in the supposedly brutal United States. Russia, she put it, was "a great prison where every individual who is known not to be in full agreement with the Communists is spied upon and booked by the GPU as an enemy of the government." It was no surprise that Abrams and his wife left Russia for Paris in November of 1925, and then continued on to Mexico, whose government was known to grant political refugees a safe haven.
Despite Abrams' disillusioning experience, my parents decided to undertake the arduous trip to the USSR to check out utopia for themselves. They arrived in Paris and boarded the train, stopping in Berlin and Warsaw, and after many appeals, received a visa and were on their way. A reading of their joint diary of the trip suggests that they were taken in by the propaganda of the Leninist regime. My mother's entry for August 24, 1924, describes a spectacle of youth marching in parade at Red Square. Seven thousand children demonstrated techniques in what my mother called the work of "physical culturists," and she remarked that the children "look well taken care of, all developing beautifully." After watching the marching and listening to the bands, she commented that it was "thrilling to see the enthusiasm of the participants; they marched off the square singing joyously all new revolutionary songs." The most wonderful thing Russia is doing "is for her children."
My parents stayed at the famous Lux Hotel, the main base camp for visiting revolutionaries. One day they went to visit the exiled IWW leader "Big Bill" Haywood, who had fled to Russia to avoid imprisonment in the United States and who was a showpiece for revolutionary solidarity. They spoke with him in his room for over an hour, but unfortunately their diary reveals little of what Haywood told them. Another day (August 28), they attended a graduation ceremony for Red Army officers, where they saw a play that included an attack on religion and a sketch showing "America, Italy, France and England trying to convince Soviet Russia to compromise herself and then they would recognize her." My mother remarked that the Soviet officers were "all intelligent and polite," which was "a great contrast to the soldiers ... of the old regime." Obviously, my parents' own revolutionary euphoria blinded them to the reality that Jack Abrams and his comrades had seen.
Yet it was Abrams, the anarchist, who galvanized me as a boy. My first remembrance of the many visits we made to Mexico City is from 1945, when I was nine. As others were gathering in Times Square to celebrate the end of World War II, we saw the giant parade that wound through downtown Mexico City. Abrams took me to the major sites and to children's films, willingly spending hours with me while my parents went off to experience Mexico's revolutionary culture. In a later visit, either 1949 or 1950, Abrams, who had learned from my parents that I had already begun to circulate in the orbit of New York's young Communist movement, did his best to warn me about the ethics and true nature of Stalin's regime. AS we all walked through the streets of beautiful Cuernavaca (now a famous tourist resort), my parents spotted the painter David Alfaro Siqueras, one of the founders of the Mexican muralist school. The famed artist approached Abrams to say hello, and much to my shock, Abrams refused to shake his hand and exchange greetings. "I don't talk to murderers," he shouted at Siqueras, and turned and walked away. When he had calmed down, Abrams told me about Siqueras's role in the attempted murder of Leon Trotsky at his estate in the Coyocan suburb of Mexico City, when the painter led a group of machine-gun-toting raiders in a failed effort to kill the exiled Bolshevik.
Abrams often socialized and became friends with other exiles, despite occasionally severe political differences. He was a regular guest at Trotsky's walled-in compound, where the two played chess and argued about Bolshevism. After his death, Trotsky's widow presented Abrams a set of Trotsky's favorite Mexican-made dishware as a remembrance of their solidarity and friendship—a gift which Abrams later passed on to my parents. Often in later years, I would serve cake to my Stalinist friends on these plates, and after they admired the beauty of the design and craftsmanship, I would tell them whose dishes they were eating from, and watch them turn pale.
Abrams also befriended the great painter Diego Rivera, who spent his years moving from Bolshevism to Trotskyism and back to official Soviet Communism. Despite these twists and turns, and probably because at critical moments Rivera had opposed Stalin, Abrams maintained the relationship. Once, he took me to meet the artist and watch him paint the murals—some of the last he was to create—in the Del Prado Hotel in the main part of the city. In later years, the hotel would cover the murals with curtains because of embarrassment about their anti-Catholic and revolutionary themes. Rivera gave Abrams some of his paintings, one of which Abrams gave to my parents. My mother kept it in her New York City apartment.
Strongly objecting to the very concept of private property, my parents refused for years to buy their own home. They eventually moved into what they called a "true cooperative," the ILGWU's cooperative housing project in New York's Chelsea district. When the original loan ran out in the 1980s, and many residents wanted to privatize their contract and thus have equity to pass on to their children, my mother and others of her generation voted against that option on the grounds that individuals should not profit from their own investments. And so the irony: When my mother passed the Rivera painting on to me near the end of her life, it was precisely when the market for Mexican art was heating up; so I brought it to Sotheby's auction house in New York, where it sold for a very handsome price which became the hefty down payment for the private home in which I now reside.
In the 1930s, the event that was of consuming interest for the Left was, of course, the Spanish Civil War. Indeed, I have in my library the well-worn copy of Franz Borkenau's The Spanish Cockpit, a gift from Abrams when I was twelve years old. "You're too young to understand this yet," he told me, "but I assure you that when you grow older, you will." His inscription reads "To Ronald: the future philosopher." But Spain was a rather sensitive topic in my parents' home, and most of the time when our family visited Abrams, a discussion of the issues raised by the civil war was avoided by mutual agreement. Anarchists like Abrams believed that the Spanish people were fighting to preserve an authentic anarchist revolution; this position was anathema to the Communists, who argued that Spain first had to win the war against Franco, fighting on behalf of a moderate Popular Front government that, while close to Moscow, would not promote revolution. My uncle Irving Keith (née Kreichman, but like so many Jewish Communists he took a new party name the better to Americanize himself) was a commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, a role he had been trained for in the famous Lenin School in Moscow; so to besmirch the Communist effort in Spain was automatically to insult his name. Thus the subject was always put aside.
"I'm really anxious to meet your son," Uncle Irving wrote to my father in one of his letters from Spain, "but that will have to wait until the war is won." I was never to meet him, however. He was killed in battle during the spring 1938 retreat. My family honored his memory, and I grew up addicted to the romance of the International Brigades. Like the actor Richard Dreyfuss, who spoke at one of their reunion conventions in the 1980s, I too considered the vets to be authentic American heroes, men whose heroism would have been recognized by a grateful nation and world if it were not for their left-wing politics.
I read my martyred uncle's letters to my mother and father. Most of them were a series of moving assurances to his own mother, sisters and brothers that there was no need to worry; he would be home safely as soon as the war against Franco resulted in the inevitable victory. But others were long political diatribes, attempts to convince his family that the Communist Popular Front policy was correct and that the philosophy of revolution advocated by the anarchists like his cousin Abrams was wrong. "The main political problem," he wrote, "is that of strengthening the unity of the working class." By that he meant the need to get the anarchists, syndicalists and socialist "irresponsibles" to join with the Spanish Communists in support of the rather moderate, nonrevolutionary goal of saving the bourgeois republic. Worse were those in the "rearguard" who opposed Communist policy and sought to "create divisions in the Popular Front." Here, my uncle Irving was obviously alluding to the supporters of the POUM, the anti-Stalinist Communists who were fraudulently condemned as "Trotskyites" by the Comintern.
These myths of the Left—to be precise, the pro-Communist Left—became part of my intellectual marrow as I was growing up in the 1940s. They were received truths, ideas to be accepted on faith among the first lessons of life.
By the time I was three years old, my parents had moved from a small Lower East Side apartment to Washington Heights, a new middle-class neighborhood populated by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and a new group of German Jews, like the parents of Henry Kissinger, who had recently fled Hitler's Germany. Many years later I found, much to my shock, that I had actually lived in the very apartment building inhabited by Ted Hall, the notorious Soviet atom-bomb spy at Los Alamos, whose role had by then been exposed through the release of the Venona files, and whose story was told by Joseph Albright and Marcia Kunstel in their book Bombshell. The Halls had moved out to Forest Hills in Queens just about when my parents moved in. I have wondered if they may have moved into the Hall apartment, and if I possibly had Ted's old room. My block, West 172nd Street and Fort Washington Avenue, was also a stronghold of numerous other Communists. A few doors down we had good friends in one family where the father was a Communist functionary, a man who disappeared and went "underground" when the Communist leaders were arrested in 1948. Other friends included a well-known "progressive" lawyer, as well as others whose general orbit was that of the front groups of the American Communist Party.
The school I attended, PS 173, was a short walk from home (in those days, we students came home for lunch and returned an hour later). The school had a largely Jewish student body; other schools in Washington Heights, depending on location, were made up primarily of Italian or black students. The neighborhood had not as yet become the largely Hispanic area, of Haitian, Dominican and other Latin American recent immigrants, that it now is. Upon dismissal at 3 P.M., I often had to run home in order to avoid the small gangs of Italian high-schoolers who showed up for the purpose of beating up younger Jewish students, thus giving me a new definition of "class struggle." One school in a large system, PS 173 had yearbooks that read like a Who's Who of successful New Yorkers. My friends and fellow students included a group of people now famous in the fields of the arts, journalism and law, like my classmate Ed Kosner, now editor of the New York Daily News; my friend David Margulies, now a prominent actor; Esther Kartiganer, an executive producer at 60 Minutes; her brother Joseph, now a prominent estate lawyer; Tom Baer, a former New York assistant district attorney and now a Democratic Party activist and film producer—the list could go on and on.
But while the students of PS 173 came from homes that were largely Jewish, the teachers were mainly Irish and conservative. Our parents, of course, controlled the PTA, and this meant perpetual conflict and classroom stress. A few incidents remain vividly in my mind. Because of pressure by the PTA to recognize what was then called "Negro History Week," for instance, an event recognized in those years only by residents of Harlem and by white Communists, we were asked to bring into class an account of Negro Americans who had contributed to American society's growth and culture. Back then, the only Negroes one could find in our textbooks were Booker T. Washington, George Washington Carver, and some anonymous, happy slaves who were taken advantage of during Reconstruction, when carpetbaggers used them for their own evil purposes. So when my classmate Jake Rosen brought in a 78 rpm record of the baritone Paul Robeson, all hell broke loose
By the onset of the Cold War, Robeson's career had been cut short, as the singer squandered his early success by dedicating himself relentlessly to a vigorous defense of the Soviet Union and Joseph Stalin. In particular, his statement at a Soviet-sponsored "peace congress" in Europe, that American Negroes would not fight on their own country's side in a war between the United States and the Soviet Union, brought down the wrath of the nation upon him. The great baseball hero Jackie Robinson reluctantly appeared in public before the House Committee on Un-American Activities to let it be known that he differed strongly with Robeson, and from that point on, the singer's career was all downhill. Of course, that meant that Robeson would become an even greater hero of the Communist Left in America, who took him to their heart and proclaimed him the nation's single greatest public figure.
Jake Rosen would gain notoriety later on as the young man who, at the Communist Festival of World Youth held in Moscow in the 1950s, is seen in an unforgettable full-page photo in Life magazine, dipping the American flag to honor Soviet chairman Nikita Khrushchev as he passed by with the U.S. delegation at the Moscow sports arena. And even later, in the 1960s, Rosen would become a founding member and leader of the Maoist Progressive Labor Party, a Marxist-Leninist sect that made the CP look like a group of tame reformists.
The Robeson incident was no doubt Jake Rosen's first political controversy. I remember Jake putting the Robeson record on a phonograph. Hearing the gigantic, booming baritone, our teacher, Agnes Driscoll, responded in awe. She praised the singing as magnificent, which it was. Who was the singer? she asked. The official report of the Communist-led New York Teacher's Union singled out the incident and reported that when Rosen identified the singer as Robeson, Driscoll "snatched the record from the player and screamed, 'that Communist in my class!'" She then told the students that "they were Communists and she knew there were others in the class, and if they didn't like it there was a plane leaving Idlewild [airport] every hour." Rosen had to report to the principal's office, whence he was sent home for the day and suspended from classes for a week. He went home in tears, propelling the PTA into action. All of us were instructed by our parents to stay home also in protest against the misconduct charge, until the school and the teacher formally apologized to Jake and called for our return.
Miss Driscoll, one of the Irish-American conservatives who had nothing but contempt for our Red parents and us, also created an incident when we had a classroom election poll in 1948, the year of the famous Dewey-Truman race. My parents, like all of the Reds and fellow travelers in the Height, were supporting the third-party candidacy of the former vice president and secretary of commerce, Henry A. Wallace, who was running on a pro-Soviet platform under the rubric of the Progressive Party. When a good number of our class voted in the mock poll for Wallace, Miss Driscoll erupted. Wallace was a Red and a traitor, she scolded, and in our classroom we could only vote for Dewey or Truman. Miss Driscoll went on to inform us that if any of our parents were intending to vote for Wallace, we should tell them they could not and should not. I ran home for lunch crying, because I felt that Miss Driscoll had turned her anger particularly on Rosen and me.
The incident became the first cause célèbre for the newly organized Teacher's Union. In its 1950 book Searchlight: An Exposé of New York City Schools, the Red-led union reported on the incident:
The Parents Association of a school in Washington Heights sent an official letter to Superintendent [of Schools William] Jansen asking him to investigate an incident in which the teacher, Miss Agnes Driscoll, had terrified her sixth grade pupils by calling them "un-American" and "Communist." The only reply they got was from an assistant ... to the effect that the letter would be "called to the Superintendent's attention." There the matter rested.
Nevertheless, the PTA of PS 173 managed to win some major victories. Once, I and some other of the best students won a coveted local award given to the schools by the Daughters of the American Revolution in honor of our commitment to our studies. Each of us received a formal citation and a medal, which we proudly pinned to our lapels. When I got home, my parents were in a rage. Immediately they phoned the parents of other medal winners, and a meeting was called. They explained to us that no child of theirs could accept a medal awarded by a reactionary and racist organization, which defined Americanism as 100 percent white and which had refused to allow the Negro singer Marian Anderson to perform at Constitution Hall in Washington, D.C., where she had been booked. Their protest received much local publicity, and in tears and humiliation, my friends and I had to bring our letters and medals back to be returned. The PTA had won the fight, and nothing else was heard about the awards. But soon after, we were all forced to give up our membership in the AAA Safety Patrol, the one job at school everyone aspired to. (Being on the patrol meant wearing a strap and official badge, and monitoring the halls and traffic outside the school.) I had just achieved the rank of captain and received a special blue badge, when suddenly I was called in after the DAR protest and told to surrender the badge and hence my status as a Safety Patrol officer. In spite of my conviction that my parents were politically correct, I came home from school angry at them for creating a stink about the Daughters of the American Revolution.
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ENCOUNTER BOOKS Copyright © 2000 Wesley J. Smith. All rights reserved.