BELLA DODD: SCHOOL OF DARKNESS: CH 8 ~11

CHAPTER EIGHT

From 1936 to 1938 I was involved in so many activities I had little time for my family and old friends. I devoted myself more and more to the new friends who shared my fanatical sense of dedication. I found little time to read anything except Party literature.

This was necessary to hold leadership in a union where many of the leaders were trained and established Communists.

The Teachers Union was growing rapidly in numbers and influence. The college teachers in the Union grew so numerous that a separate local with a separate office was established for them, Local537. Together with the WPA Local Number 453, our membership grew to almost nine thousand and we extended control to many upstate locals. At its peak the Union boasted ten thousand members, and in it the Communist Party had a fraction of close to a thousand. Among them were Moscow-trained teachers and men and women who had attended the sixth World Congress of the Comintern.

The president of the Union, Charles J. Hendley, a history teacher at George Washington High School, was not a Communist. He was a militant socialist and did not join the Communist Party until he retired from the school system. He then became associated with the Daily Worker. He was, however, willing to join with the Communists in the many and varied campaigns of the Teachers Union and of the labor movement generally.

He grew to like many of the Communist Party leaders in the Union and that tended to minimize political differences. He was a lonely man; the Union and its leadership were his family and his social life.

The Party left nothing to chance. When in 1936 Lefkowitz and Linville left the Teachers Union because the Communists had control, the Party immediately suggested a candidate for office manager, and Dorothy Wallas, a brassy and pleasant blonde, was placed there to insure Party control, and especially control of the president.

Mr. Hendley carried a full program as a teacher and had little time to give to office detail, but the efficient Miss Wallas was always at hand. He grew fond of her and relied more and more on her judgment, not knowing, of course, that she was a Party member. Miss Wallas meantime used her position as palace favorite to run the office as she saw fit, and, since Mr. Hendley was at school all day, she began to make important decisions.

I was seldom in the Union office. I was at Albany, or out of town organizing, or at City Hall, or at the Board of Education. But to be effective in the Union I found I had to give some consideration to the inner-office politics and I soon learned that Miss Wallas was an inner wheel functioning smoothly.

She and I did not clash because I did not want a road block in my relations with Mr. Hendley. As I had often heard her criticize the Communists, I was convinced that she was not one.

There was another group at the office, a rigidly communist puritanical group, old-time leaders of the fraction. The thirty or so who made up this group had known each other for years. They had led the struggle against Linville and Lefkowitz. Some had the blessings of Moscow and they were a sort of élite corps, disciplined and unbending except when the Party spoke.

There was a subtle struggle for leadership between this inner core and myself. My strength in any controversy lay in the fact that the Party was using me in labor, legislative, and peace campaigns and that I was used in key positions in labor politics.

This gave me prestige which I used to keep the life of the Union from freezing into a rigid communist pattern. I deferred to them often, however, and was firm only when it came to Union policy on the economic interests of the teachers and the need to gain political respect for the Union.

The Party literature of the period was stressing the increasing importance of united fronts for peace, against fascism, against discrimination, against economic insecurity. Earl Browder and other Party leaders were warning Union leaders not to regard Marxism as dogmatic, but as flexible in meeting new situations. As a matter of fact, this literature sometimes seemed a handicap, cluttered as it was with double talk used purposely by Marx and Lenin. Browder emphasized the importance of relying on Stalin who was building socialism in Russia, and only on Stalin because of his shrewdness in dealing with all, even with enemies of the working class, such as English and American capitalists.

We who were the leaders of the united-front period used to shake our heads at the old guard in the Union and scornfully call them Nineteen Fivers, referring to the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Yet I see now that this old guard with its endless disputation gave stability to Party control of our Union. It was their whole life; few got anything for their endless hours of work except the right to control. They were dour people though, and some of them, such as Celia Lewis and Clara Rieber, were so dedicated that they were intolerant of anyone’s opinions except the opinions of those on their side. I never saw them laugh and I doubt if they knew how.

We had one man in the Union who was so talented in manipulation that he was regarded as the Stalin of the Union ~ Dale Zysman, also known as Jack Hardy. He had been to Moscow. He had written The First American Revolution, thus implying that a greater one was to come. A junior high school teacher, he was a tall, personable young man with a keen interest in baseball and he held his pipe in his mouth at exactly the angle Stalin did his.

The communist fraction had installed him officially as vice-president of the Teachers Union and also unofficially as the arbiter in all disputes between Party members and groups. He also established contacts with non-Party personalities for possible work in the Union. It was he who tried to give the Union Executive Board a well-balanced appearance by persuading Protestant and Catholic teachers to accept posts on the Board where most of the members were communist atheists.

Dale also maintained an espionage system which brought back information on what was going on in the Union as well as in the inner circles of other teachers’ organizations. Those who worked in this espionage system, particularly in other left-wing groups, became twisted personalities. Dale, I learned later, reported directly to “Chester,” a man I was to know as the chief of the Party’s intelligence service.

Later I ran into a real problem with Dale and our blond office manager. Dorothy was making my position with Mr. Hendley difficult by spreading false stories about me. I could not spend hours in the office just to counteract office intrigue. I got nowhere when I took the matter to Dale.

But one day two bookkeepers brought me evidence of financial irregularities. They did not want to take it to Mr.Hendley because Miss Wallas was involved. I took this up with Dale and got a brush-off. Then one day the mystery cleared.

We learned that Miss Wallas was not only a good Communist but that she was also Dale’s sister! It explained much, and I thought it should be taken up with the leaders of the fraction. But when I stated my discovery and looked at Celia and Clara and the others to get their reactions it was clear from their faces they had known it all the time. I was the one kept in the dark. Miss Wallas was soon afterward sent elsewhere and I was free to carry on my work; but for some time I was unnerved by this duplicity.

Attending conventions took much of my time. No convention of teachers in the United States ever went unnoticed by the Communist Party. The national office would call the leaders of the teacher Communists and discuss with us the nature of the organization and inquire if we had Party members in it.

If we had, we would decide which resolutions they were to introduce and which they were to oppose. If we had no members, observers would be sent to make contacts. Particular attention was given to pushing federal aid to the public-education program and to the issue of separation of church and state at these conventions.

We also carefully prepared for meetings of learned societies, such as mathematics and modern language associations, and those composed of professors of physics, history, and social studies. A careful search of Party members and friends of the Party was made, as well as of liberals and special interest groups. This was all done months in advance. Then a campaign began to get certain people elected or to have them volunteer to go to a convention so that we would have a core of dependables.

Finally we drew up a plan of action to put through certain measures and to try to defeat others.

We felt it was important at these meetings of learned societies to defeat everything which did not conform to Marxist ideology. The result was that the ideology of many of our learned societies has within the last thirty years been deeply affected. The Communists establish a fraction in such societies and whenever possible a leadership for a materialistic, collectivistic, international class-struggle approach.

The conventions were invaluable in bringing together the growing group of scholars who were not members of the Party but who followed Marxist ideology idealistically. For the strength of the Party was increasing in high positions; and job getting and job promotions are a sine qua non of academic gatherings.

Men are drawn where power is, and these academic men were no different in that respect from traveling salesmen. The Party and its friends were assiduous in developing the job-getting and job-giving phase of these meetings.

At the end of a convention they returned with lists of new conquests, the names of men and women who would go along with us. These names were given to the district organizer of the Party in the locality where each professor lived. The organizer would visit and try to deepen the ideological conquest by flattering his victim, disclosing to him new vistas of usefulness, and by introducing him to an interesting social life. The methods were many; the end was one ~ a closer tie to the Party.

Before long a professor would become involved in the proletarian class struggle. His name would then be used to support communist public declaration on national or international policies.

Soon the professor identified himself with a “side,” and all the good people were on his side and all the greedy, the degraded, the stupid were on the other.

Soon he began talking of “our people” and thinking himself part of an unnumbered army of justice marching to a brave new world, or, as one French intellectual Communist, who lost his life in the Resistance, put it, toward “singing tomorrows.”

American Federation of Teachers conventions were held during the summer months so teacher delegates could attend without having to leave their classes or to get special permission. This Federation was unique in American education in that it was the only teachers’ association organized on a union basis.

The history of the plan for affiliating teachers with labor is interesting.

It was first tried in 1902in San Antonio where a charter was issued directly by the A.F. of L. Later the same year the Chicago Teachers Federation, organized in 1897, affiliated itself with the Chicago Federation of Labor to get labor support for a salary fight with the “vested interests.” Many prominent Chicagoans, among them Jane Addams, urged the teachers to affiliate with labor.

A debate raged in educational periodicals as to the advisability of teachers unionizing, a debate which has gone on ever since. By 1916 twenty teachers’ organizations in ten different states had affiliated with labor. Some were short-lived, due to local suppression, or to loss of interest, after the immediate objective was won.

In 1916 a call was issued by the Chicago Teachers Union to all locals affiliated with labor. A meeting was held and the American Federation of Teachers, a national organization, was founded. The next month it affiliated with the A.F. of L. with eight charter locals in Chicago, Gary, New York City, Scranton, and Washington, D.C., with a combined membership of twenty-eight hundred.

The American Teacher, a magazine published by a group of individuals in the New York union, was endorsed as the official publication. At first hostile, boards of education exercised pressure against the new teachers’ organization, but by 1920 there were one hundred and forty locals and a membership of twelve thousand.

The American Federation of Teachers in the beginning was sparked by socialists. Its growth was due to the antiwar principles of the American socialists, for there was need of an organization to help teachers involved in the anti-war struggle. Even then most of the members were not socialists but were attracted by the Federation program for economic and social aid. By 1927 the Federation had declined in membership and prestige because of attacks on organized labor. With the coming of the depression it again began to grow and by 1934 there were seventy-five locals in good standing with an active membership of almost ten thousand.

By that time the Communists were displacing the socialists from posts of radical leadership in unions. The steady march of the Communists into the Federation at this period was planned and not accidental. Since twenty-five teachers could form a local and send delegates to the national convention, the communist district organizers began promoting the organizing of teachers, and these began to send delegates, often charming and persuasive ones.

Many of the teachers were not interested in the political struggle in the Federation and did not care to go as delegates. Even in the New York local in my time it was difficult to get non-Party people to go as delegates because the Federation did not pay expenses. But the keenest competition existed among Party members. The communist faction within the Federation drew up its list carefully and it was considered a mark of honor for Party members or fellow travelers to be selected.

Of course, from 1936 to 1938 our delegation from Local 5 to Federation conventions had to be divided between the communist group which was in control and the opposition which consisted of socialist splinter groups. The struggle between these groups was carried to the national conventions, often to the consternation of the political innocents who still believed that all American politics was ruled by the Republican and the Democratic parties. They could not understand the bitterness, the vituperation, and sometimes the terror which their colleagues exhibited. But one fact was clear to others: the conventions of the Federation became battles for the capture of the minds and the votes of the independent delegates.

My first federation convention was in Philadelphia in 1936. Since it was close to New York City, we were able to send a full quota of delegates while many of the out-of-town locals were forced to send only token representation. To make matters worse we had impressed on the members of the New York fraction that even if they were not delegates they would be needed to entertain and lobby with delegates from other sections.

We were so well organized that we were in almost complete control. The arrangements were in the hands of the Philadelphia local, itself communist led and controlled. The party assigned its ablest trades-union functionaries to hold continuous secret sessions in a room at the convention hotel to aid comrades on all questions.

If I had not yet been convinced that the road to progress was the one pointed out by the Communists, I was certainly overwhelmed by the sense of power which this convention manifested. To it came professors whose names I had read in academic literature and in the press.

There was a wide range of delegates, from university men and women of distinction and old-time classroom teachers with the staid dignity that seemed so much a part of the profession in America to the young substitute and unemployed teachers who eyed their situation with economic fear and political and philosophical defiance. There was also the WPA troop, an assortment of men and women who were called teachers but many of whom had been shifted into this category because they were on relief, or had a college education, or some talent that allowed them to be called teachers, such as teaching tap dancing or hairdressing.

A great leveling process was at work in American life and at that time it seemed to me a good thing. So it also seemed to the Communist Party, but for a different reason. This professional leveling would fit teachers better into its class-struggle philosophy and so bring them to identify themselves with the proletariat.

At the convention were various interesting personalities: neat, quiet Albert Blumberg from Johns Hopkins University, the shrewdest communist agent in the Federation; Jerome Davis, just fired from the Yale Divinity School, thrown out, we were told, because he had dared promote a strike of student cafeteria workers; Mary Foley Crossman, president of the Philadelphia local, a fine and able woman; Miss Allie Mann, a good parliamentarian and charming woman from the largest Southern local of Atlanta, and one of the noncommunist leaders.

The convention was entirely swallowed up by the Communists. They passed every resolution they wanted and I began to feel that we had enough votes to pass a resolution for a Soviet America.

Jerome Davis was elected president of the Federation and his cause became the rallying point around which we fought during the next year. The fight for his reinstatement at Yale also became a Teachers Union cause.

The college division of the Federation voted to picket Yale and I was elected to a committee to negotiate with the Yale Corporation for his reinstatement. We were an unusual group of pickets for we wore caps and gowns and paraded with dignity on the beautiful campus, but we carried picket signs to show that we were the intellectual brothers of every worker on strike.

After some hours the Yale Corporation agreed to see a committee of three chosen from the delegation. I was one of them. In a gloomy paneled room with high ceilings we sat in high-backed chairs ~ my feet hardly touched the floor ~ and faced four members of the Corporation, silent men who would not talk except to say they were there only to listen. In vain we asked questions. The answer was always the same: they were there to listen, not to argue.

We outlined our demands. We made propaganda speeches about the role of American educators and about the right of a professor to participate in community problems. Then we reported to the assembled academic picketers that the power of concentrated wealth which the Yale Corporation represented had heard our remarks and promised to consider them.

As a result of our efforts the Corporation agreed to give Professor Davis a year’s salary but refused to reinstate him. We were satisfied. He had got something out of our efforts and the Federation had a president who was a college professor.

The next convention was held in Madison, Wisconsin, the following year and again I was delegate. Our Teachers Union had fared well that year in New York, having grown enormously in numbers, prestige, and victories. I had once again taken a leave of absence from Hunter in the spring of the year to represent the Union at the legislature. The trustees of the college had been reluctant to grant this leave but intercession by Mayor LaGuardia, with whom I was still on friendly terms, again assuredly leave.

The CIO organization of mass unions and the rapid rise in union membership everywhere had brought great prestige and tremendous power to labor. We teachers rode on labor’s coattails and were grateful to the Party for helping us to remain close to labor through all the shifts.

By 1937 the sit-down strikes in large plants and in WPA and welfare offices in New York fired the imagination of young intellectuals in the Teachers Union and we were eager to throw our lot in with the CIO. Wherever the Party teachers had influence we joined with strikers and walked in their picket lines. In New York we joined the newspapermen at the Brooklyn Eagle and at the Newark Ledger; at the telegraph offices we joined the communications workers. On the water front we gave time and money and even our homes to striking seamen. We marched in May Day parades in cap and gown.

That year we went to the convention hoping to take the Federation into John L. Lewis’ CIO. We were fascinated by him, by his shaggy head and incredible eyebrows, by his biblical allusions, and by his Shakespearean acting. We were an odd group as I see it now, madcap intellectuals escaping from our classrooms, to teach workers’ classes in Marxism and Leninism in our free hours. A few of the more astute paid only lip service to this activity, hoping to capture higher posts in academic circles where better service could be given to the cause. But most of the professors involved in this merry-go-round became better politicians than they were educators.

The convention at Madison had a large contingent of college professors, especially from teacher-training schools, and they began more and more to dominate the Federation.

Among them were John de Boer and Dorothy Douglas and a score of brilliant left-wingers, including the attractive Hugh de Lacy from the West Coast. Even then De Lacy was engaged in splitting the Democratic Party by the formation of the Democratic Federation which resulted in his election to Congress. He was a valuable addition to the communist cause.

The Communist Party had told us that it did not want the teachers to go into the CIO. It felt it had enough power within the CIO whereas in the A.F. of L. the Party’s forces were diminishing. I was bitterly disappointed for I believed that with the liberal CIO forces and its funds the Teachers Union movement could be vastly expanded. The A.F. of L. did not like to spend money in organizing teachers. The Party took no chances on having its instructions miscarry.

Rose Wortis and Roy Hudson, from the Central Committee, were at the convention hotel to steer the comrades aright. Roy was a tall, angular ex-seaman and Browder’s labor specialist. He pounded the table and laid down the law. I told him frankly that I thought we ought to go with the CIO and Jerome Davis and the professors agreed.

But we were informed that the Party did not wish it, and discipline was firm among the floor leaders. A vote was taken and we held to the Party line. The Communists uniting with some of the conservative members of the Federation defeated the CIO proposal.

In the city-wide 1937 elections in New York, the Party, which had helped establish the American Labor Party the year before, captured several important places within it. In city politics there was a steady elimination of differences between the major parties, and responsible leadership in the two old parties was disappearing. This led inevitably to the control of all parties by a small group around Fiorello LaGuardia, whose political heir was Vito Marcantonio. It was a personal dictatorship.

Nominations were traded in the struggle for power, and the Communist Party was not slow in insinuating itself into this struggle.

Those who say LaGuardia was a great mayor forget that he did more to break down the major political parties and party responsibility than any other person in New York State. The streets were clean, taxes were lower, graft was less obvious, but under LaGuardia political power was transferred from the people organized into political parties into the hands of groups exercising personal power.

The real political power passed to the well-financed, well-organized unions of the CIO and of the leftwing A.F. of L. and to the organized national minority groups, Negro, Italian, Jewish, etc. These groups were used as political machines to get votes and their self-appointed leaders were rewarded with the spoils of office. This new pattern I saw repeated over and over again and it drained both Republican and Democratic Parties.

I saw LaGuardia meet with the Communists. I saw him accept from Si Gerson and Israel Amter written withdrawal from a position to which they had been nominated and receive a certificate of substitution at the mayor’s request. A half-hour later I heard him address the Social Democrat wing of the American Labor Party at the Hotel Claridge, and the first thing he did was excoriate the Communists. Communists were in the audience and not one of them seemed even to notice this humbug. Thus LaGuardia played with both wings of the Labor Party to his own advantage. Such were the politics to which the idealists were giving themselves.

The election campaign for 1937 was important to the left wing for it could begin now to make deals for power, with the Social Democrats of the American Labor Party, with the Democrats, with the Republicans, and with men of wealth who wanted public office and public spoils.

The American Labor Party that year supported the LaGuardia slate, which included Thomas Dewey for district attorney. I was surprised when Abe Unger, a Party lawyer whom I knew well, asked me to help organize a woman’s committee for the election of Thomas Dewey. How Abe got into that campaign I do not know, but I do know that he organized for Dewey the labor groups which had earlier opposed him because of his investigations and prosecution of many unions.

I remember one especially hilarious Teachers Union meeting that year just before the election. It was held at the Hotel Diplomat and we were cheering the candidates of the American Labor Party and its allies when Thomas Dewey, accompanied by his campaign managers, whizzed into the meeting and whizzed out again after making a short speech. And I thought, with satirical amusement, that politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

By 1938 my work for the Union and for the schools was engaging me so deeply that it interfered with my work as a teacher, so I decided to resign from Hunter and take a full-time position with the Union.

Many of my friends were surprised to hear of my decision. They were amazed that I should be willing to leave the college, my tenure, and my pension, and other rights for an uncertain union job at a reduced salary, and worst of all for a job dependent on yearly elections.

President Colligan was deeply distressed when I told him and he asked me to reconsider. “These people will take you and use you, Bella,” he warned me, “and then they will throw you away.”

I looked at him. I could see that he was sincerely troubled about me and I appreciated it. But I thought him old-fashioned and fearful of new viewpoints. Besides, I knew he was a Catholic and opposed to the forces with which I was associated.

I shook my head. “No, I have decided,” I told him. “In this country one hundred and forty million Americans have no tenure and no security. I’ll take my chances with them.” And I handed him my resignation from Hunter College

CHAPTER NINE

I gave up my Hunter College work mainly because I felt I could not serve two masters. If I remained a teacher, I felt my undivided attention ought to be given to my students and not shared with outside organizations. I was afraid also that, if I remained a teacher, as many teacher politicians did, there would be a conflict between my desire to serve the interests of the college and my sense of dedication to the interests of the “downtrodden.”

I made the choice without regard for the future, confident that in the working class I should find satisfaction and security. As the legislative year again approached, I became a full-time employee of the Teachers Union at sixty dollars a week. This is the salary I received during the years I worked for the Union. I did not then or later ask for an increase. I was sensitive about workers’ money. I had heard so much about “pie card artists” who were the opportunists and careerists in the trade-unions movement that I did not want to tempt myself. I worked for the Union for eight years at that salary.

In that first year I devoted myself especially to pressuring the New York Board of Education to fulfill its moral obligation to thousands of substitute teachers who had been in the schools during the depression as per-diem employees. They taught a full program on a par with the regularly appointed teachers in all things except that they did not receive an annual wage, had no vacation pay, and were docked for every day ill or absent. These teachers hated holidays, for on those days they went unpaid, and they had no pension rights. They were called “substitute” teachers, but they were not substituting for anyone.

The result was an educational jungle in which only the most strident voices could be heard. In fact the law of the jungle itself was sometimes followed. The WPA teachers, the substitutes, the instructors’ associations in the colleges, were goaded by a sense of injustice and a fear of failure. This was the lush soil in which the communist teachers’ fraction in the Teachers Union flourished.

The fact that the opportunity for free public education was provided in New York City from grades through college without expense to parents, with even textbooks free, created an intellectual proletariat. These men and women needed jobs commensurate with their education, and teaching at that time was the work most sought by them. When these would-be teachers began to run into the political ineptness and the callous do-nothing policy of the educational authorities there was bound to be conflict.

In the substitute teachers’ campaign I attracted thousands of nonunion teachers. I felt I had to find a way to help them. And in a quiet way they began to be grateful to the Communists.

There were dark by-products of the struggle. The younger teachers who had been forced into the WPA and substitute-teacher categories were the children of the most recent immigrants, the Italians, the Greeks, the Jews from Russia, and the Slavs. Merging with this group were the children of the expanding Negro population of the city who were qualified educationally for professional jobs. The positions of power and of educational supervision, however, were held mostly by persons of English, Scotch, and Irish origin.

The Communists, who are unerring in attaching themselves to an explosive situation, had their answers for these troubled young teachers. Their chief answer was that we had reached the “breakdown of the capitalist system.”

To those who were self-conscious on race or religion they said that “religious or racial discrimination” was the cause. When individual instances of bigotry and discrimination arose, the Communists were quick to note them and to exaggerate them.

So a cleavage was established between the older teachers, who were largely Protestants, Catholics, and conservative Jews, and the new teachers who were increasingly freethinkers, atheists, or agnostics, and sometimes called themselves “humanists.”

The Teachers Union was in a dilemma on the substitute teacher question. On the one hand, it wanted to cater to the older and more established teachers who were saying that the Union was championing only the rag, tag, and bobtail of the profession. On the other hand, it knew that the substitutes of today would be the regulars of the future; and besides more Communists could be recruited from those pinched economically.

The fraction leaders of the Union were divided on the issue. Some were willing to drop it because they wanted to hold a position of authority among the regular teachers, so that they could influence educational policy and curriculum change. I sometimes came back from Albany to find the old guard with set, grim faces, and I knew they had been discussing the disavowal of the campaign for the substitute teachers.

To me it was a cause, and I appealed to the Party for a decision. I received a favorable one. I now began consciously to build new Party leadership in the Union. I surrounded myself with younger Party members who were more alert to new situations and did not think in rigid Marxist patterns.

We did not succeed in passing the substitute-teacher legislation for which we fought at Albany. But we made it the most controversial legislation of the 1938 sessions. Later, when it was passed byte legislature, Governor Lehman vetoed it reluctantly after the entire Board of Education had used its power against it. However, in vetoing it he urged New York City to do something about the situation.

He added that if the city failed to do so he would act favorably on such legislation in the future. The Union and the communist group grew immeasurably in stature and prestige among the new crop of teachers and among other civil-service employees. Even politicians and public officials respected us for our relentless campaign.

I was weary at the end of that session. Yet I stayed in Albany to attend the State Constitutional Convention, determined to write into the new constitution guarantees for an expanding public-school system. Charles Poletti, former lieutenant governor and Supreme Court judge, was secretary of the Convention, and he, together with Edward Weinfeld, now a federal judge, was helpful in safeguarding the achievements of the public-school system.

In the fall of 1938, the American Labor Party nominated me for the Assembly in the old Tenth Assembly district, the area including Greenwich Village. It was a famous district represented at various times by Herbert Brownell and MacNeil Mitchell. On the ticket with me and running for Congress from the same area was George Backer, at that time married to Dorothy Schiff, owner of the New York Post. It was the period when the Alex Rose-David Dubinsky wing of the Labor Party and the communist wing were still in coalition ~ an uneasy alliance born of expediency. Both were seeking control of New York State politics.

The Teachers Union organized my campaign committee. We wrote political songs, made recordings, and did a great deal of street-corner speaking. By this time I had taken part in so many election campaigns in difficult areas that I developed a facility for speechmaking.

One of my favorite charges was that the candidates of the Republican Party and of the Democratic Party were lawyers connected with the same law partnership, a firm which represented the public-utility interests. We used to enlarge on this fact, and concluded with “Tweedledum and Tweedledee ~ you’d better vote the ALP.”

Late one evening, as I was winding up a street-corner meeting at Seventh Avenue and Fourteenth Street, I saw David Dubinsky, who lived in the neighborhood, and George Meany go by.

They stopped to listen for a few moments, then smiled at each other, and went on. Suddenly, and for the first time, there came over me a sense of futility over this endless activity in which the Communists were involving me.

That year John and I were living in a small and charming house on West Eleventh Street. My parents occupied one floor, John and I the next, and the duplex above us we rented to Susan Woodruff and her husband. Susan was a dear old lady whose husband was a Princeton graduate and a Republican. Susan, on the other hand, was an avowed Communist and admirer of the Soviet Union; though like her husband she traced her ancestry to the early settlers of America. Later she became one of the three old ladies who ostensibly owned the Daily Worker.

I loved Susan and respected her for the honesty of her open affection for the Soviet Union. She had gone to Russia in the thirties and had taken pictures of Soviet scenes. These she had arranged in slides and she offered to show them free as well as give a lecture to churches and Y’s. She genuinely believed that the Soviet Union meant an advance for humanity and she was eager to do her part in strengthening it.

The Party was always happy to use such voluntary propagandists. Even anti-communists never attempted to show such people as Susan that Communists and their fellow travelers were helping to undermine not a selfish capitalist class, but the very life of her own group.

She was surrounded by likeminded people, Mary van Kleek of the Russell Sage Foundation, Josephine Truslow Adams, Annie Pennypacker, and Ferdinanda Reed. When I saw Susan and others of old American families devoted to the principles of service to humanity it helped to allay any doubts I had.

At the end of 1938 we gave up our house in the Village and moved to one in Poughkeepsie because my parents wanted to be in the country. My father’s health was failing. My mother welcomed the chance to be in the country again. I kept a room in the city and went home for weekends. John was often away on business and the rest of the time he stayed in Poughkeepsie, for he, too, preferred country living.

The legislative session of 1939 had reflected the now deepening depression which had been gathering momentum. The public hearings on the state budget which took place on Lincoln’s Birthday brought demands for a cut in state aid to education. It was a struggle now between the organized taxpayer group with the slogan, “Ax the tax,” and the Teachers Union which led an army of teachers and parents with the counter slogan, “Don’t use the ax on the child.” But a ten per cent cut in state aid was passed ~ a cut which we felt endangered the education program and meant a loss of teachers’ jobs.

At the end of the session the legislature passed a resolution calling for a legislative investigation into the costs of education and of the administrative procedures of education. There was a rider at the end calling for an investigation into the subversive activities of teachers in New York City.

I called immediate attention to the fact that the study of the costs of education was tied to one for investigating subversive activities. I concluded that the legislative leaders wanted to reduce costs, but that in order to do so it would be necessary to smear the teachers. I charged they were using a Red baiting technique to undermine education.

Neither Mayor LaGuardia nor the officials of the American Labor Party would move to ward off this attack. A legislative committee was appointed, headed by Senator Frederic Coudert, a Republican from New York City, and Herbert Rapp, a Republican from upstate. Other teacher organizations discounted this attack on the educational budget and regarded it merely as an attack on the Teachers Union, and no doubt were secretly pleased.

In April 1939 John called me in Albany and urged me to come home immediately. My father was dying in St. Francis Hospital in Poughkeepsie.

I was very grateful to John that despite his hostility to Catholicism he had recognized my father’s wishes and had called a Catholic doctor and then taken him to a Catholic hospital. Ruth Jenkins, my secretary, drove me at a furious speed through a night of sleety rain. When I reached the hospital, my father was alone behind screens with an oxygen tank beside him, unconscious or asleep.

A nun attending him told me he had received the last rites. I felt thankful though I had long since ceased believing in such things myself. I did feel that something was needed to lessen the pain of dying and to give life meaning.

As I stood by my father’s bedside looking at him, my hand over his, he opened his eyes, still so blue and bright, and, though he could not speak, he looked at me steadily, and then a single tear fell from his eye. It cut into me and troubled me for years afterward, for somehow it seemed to represent his sorrow about me. I thought, with remorse, how in these cluttered years I had failed him as a daughter and had left him without my companionship.

He was buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery at Poughkeepsie. There were not many at the funeral but the town officials gave him a motor escort to the cemetery, as evidence of their affection for him as a friend and good citizen. After the funeral I went back to Albany with a heavy heart to face a mass of work.

The Communist Party had been quick to realize that to avert the attack on the communist teachers, a thing which might lead to the heart of the Party; it must help the campaign against the pending Rapp-Coudert investigation. In a move to spare the Union the strain of all this and also to bring people other than teachers into the fight, we organized a committee called “Friends of the Free Public Schools.” Under its aegis we collected funds, more than $150,000 the first year. We published attractive booklets which we sent to teacher organizations, to trade unions, to women’s clubs, to public officials.

I set up a booth and an exhibit at the New York State Fair in Syracuse and I covered numerous county fairs, issuing a strident call for aid to the public schools. We got free time on dozens of radio programs. We put on interesting programs over a radio station in New York. We organized “Save Our Schools” community clubs, made up of teachers, parents, trade unionists, students, and young people.

We were a well-trained army and by our well-organized action we gave people a feeling that in the long run we would win.

That summer saw a new attack on the New York Teachers Union. Friends of Dr. Lefkowitz, largely from the professorial group in the American Federation of Teachers, together with a socialist bloc, some old-line A.F. of L. members, and some anti-communists, were organized.

They were under leadership of Dr. George Counts and Professor John Childs of Teachers College, Professor George Axtelle of Chicago, the socialist teachers’ bloc of Detroit, the Teachers Union of Atlanta, Selma Borchard of Washington, and George Googe who was the A.F. of L. representative at the convention that year. These, together with New York City minority groups, chief among whom were Lovestonites led by Ben Davidson (later secretary of the Liberal Party of New York City) and his wife Eve, formed a mixed group but it united for one objective.

They planned to take the leadership in the Federation from the Communists. But the Party brought in reserve strength from the Northwest, from California, from the South, in addition to its forces in the East and New England. We had not been too successful in the Middle West, where the conservative Chicago Teachers Union and the St. Paul and Minneapolis teachers with their large locals swamped the small locals of college teachers and private schoolteachers which we had been able to establish. Loss of control faced the Communists.

To make matters worse, news of the Soviet-Nazi pact broke during the week of the convention, with the result that we were now driven into a minority position. Even though some hidden Communists remained in office, we were powerless to use the American Federation of Teachers to help the distraught New York locals. We feared that the newly elected officers would do their own investigating of the New York situation, and perhaps lift our charters.

The Soviet-Nazi collaboration came at a time when the civilized world could no longer remain silent at the Nazi atrocities against Jews and other minorities. The large Jewish membership of the unions under the leadership of David Dubinsky and Alex Rose had its own reasons for hating the Communists, reasons arising out of the old feuds and the struggle to control unions, and because of the untrustworthiness of the Communists in joint enterprises. Now these people were genuinely outraged at the picture of Molotov shaking hands with Von Ribbentrop.

The Jewish people within the Party were also disturbed and quite a few left it. Those who remained rationalized the event on the ground that the warmongers of the West wanted to destroy the Soviet Fatherland, so in self-defense it had outfoxed the Western “warmongers” by making an alliance with their enemy. I was too busy with the teachers’ problem to give much attention to this outrage though it troubled me.

Though the Communists supported Mayor LaGuardia in the election campaigns I became impatient with his attitude on teacher problems and finally to exert pressure we threw a picket line around City Hall. We made a singing picket line; twenty-four hours of it, an all-day and all-night picketing and, as a publicity stunt, I announced to the press that there would be prayers at sunrise. I tried to get a Catholic priest to say the sunrise prayers for us, but even the priests from the poor parishes around City Hall looked at me oddly and said they could not do it without permission from the chancery. I offered to pay them, to make a contribution to their charities, but they only eyed me more oddly and refused with thanks. Eventually a liberal minister agreed to come and lead our pickets in prayer.

The Party did not arrange for that picket line but it was pleased when the news hit the front-pages of the newspapers and they used pictures of the pickets at Morning Prayer. Strange as it may seem, I believe we did pray that morning.

This episode ended my friendship with LaGuardia, for he was furious at the adverse publicity. It did accomplish something. The Board of Education was ordered to look into the situation of the substitute teachers.

By fall of 1939 the Rapp-Coudert Committee had settled down to work with a score of investigators. On the committee were men I could not dislike, mild, fair men such as Robert Morris, Philip Haberman of the Anti-Defamation League, and Charles S. Whitman, son of the former governor of New York.

Assemblyman Rapp was an up-stater concerned chiefly with educational finance and administration. So he played a negligible role in the investigation.

That left one person on whom to turn our combined fury. Senator Coudert was a Republican, cold and patrician in appearance. Because of his international law firm with an office in Paris and the fact that it acted for many White Russians, we looked on him as an agent of imperialism. From the Communist Party and from the men who represented the Soviet interests in this country we got the go ahead signal to make him our target. The Party placed its forces at the teachers’ disposal, since the teachers were now in the vanguard holding the line in defense of the Party itself.

I knew that the fight would be bitter, but I was not prepared for its violence. The first attack was on the membership lists of the Teachers Union. Within the Union there were still those who belonged to the splinter groups, Lovestonites, Trotskyites, Socialists, but in the course of the fight in 1940 these splinter groups left the Union and busied themselves in other organizations. Local Five was served with a demand, a subpoena duces tecum, by the Rapp-Coudert Committee to produce all our records, membership lists, and financial reports.

There was general consultation. The Party established a joint chief-of-staff group with several from the teachers’ fraction. It included such Party leaders as Israel Amter, Jack Stackel, Charles Krumbein, all from Party headquarters, and several of the Party’s lawyers. They were a top command to direct operations. The strategy decided on was to defend the teachers by defending the Party. The lesser policy, or tactics, was to be established from day to day.

For the “Committee to Defend the Public Schools” we hired a battery of lawyers, as it was impossible for one lawyer to attend to the many demands. We decided to fight the seizure of our Union membership lists all the way to the Court of Appeals. This would gain time and enable us to continue organizing the mass campaigns against the legislative committee. It would also serve to wear out the investigating committee.

To protect our membership lists we appealed for trade union support. We sent speakers to union meetings on the water front, to the hotel and restaurant workers, to the meat cutters, to the state, county, and municipal workers, both A.F. of L. and CIO. We trained speakers, prepared speakers’ outlines, mimeographed form resolutions, and sent hundreds of form telegraph messages to the governor and to majority and minority leaders.

We tried even the impossible. I remember one state A.F. of L. meeting in Albany presided over by Tom Lyons, then its president. I asked for the floor, made an appeal for support, and reminded the delegates that the struggle for union organization had been a long and tough one, that at one time union men carried their cards in the soles of their shoes. I pointed out that though it was our Union which was under attack, it might be theirs tomorrow. Then I moved for support.

I got none whatsoever. The communist delegates in that audience were afraid to speak up. And then I saw that there was more compassion in the face of Tom Lyons who was opposed to everything I stood for than in the faces of the comrades who were preserving their own skins. It had been our decision that membership lists were not to be turned over to the Committee even if we lost in the courts.

The membership files were turned over to me and I was ordered to refuse to turn the lists in, preferring jail if necessary. I happened to be out of the office when the Committee came to demand them, and Miss Wallas, in whose custody were the public schoolteacher lists, gave them to the representatives of the Committee, presumably at Mr. Hendley’s direction.

I burned the lists of the college Union teachers which were in my possession. We were afraid that through them the Committee would be able to trace a pattern of membership, since our cards showed who sponsored each individual and the date on which he joined.

Once the Committee got the cards it began to issue subpoenas. We instructed those teachers who were not Party members to appear before the Committee and to tell the truth. But there were hundreds for whom the truth might mean dismissal, and these we decided to protect.

The Party now placed at our services its intelligence apparatus, for the Communist Party has its own intelligence officers, in splinter groups, in the trade unions, in major divisions of our body politic, in the police departments, and in intelligence divisions of the Government. I was to see some proof obits efficiency. For no sooner did the Rapp-Coudert Committee begin to issue subpoenas than I got a message from Chester, who was in charge of the Party Intelligence, assuring me he had arranged for a liaison who would meet me regularly with information on what was going on in the Rapp-Coudert Committee.

I met my contact daily, in cafeterias, restaurants, and public buildings. She was an attractive, aristocratic blonde, well-dressed and charming. She gave me slips of paper which bore the names of those witnesses whom the Committee was using to get information and a list of those who were to be subpoenaed.

Armed with this advance information, we would go to the Union members who were to be called and warn them. If we wanted to gain time, the person was told to send word he was sick, even enter a hospital if necessary. If it were feasible, he was to move. If not, we assigned a lawyer or a union representative to go with the person to the hearing. Most of the teachers were instructed not to answer questions and to take a possible contempt citation. Some were instructed to resign from their jobs, because we feared the Committee would publish the facts about their international connections. If the teachers told the truth, they might involve other Party contacts.

The Coudert Committee issued more than six hundred subpoenas. The teachers over whom the Party had control followed our directions and instructions. Because they were forewarned by us they were able, with our assistance, to prepare defense stories to give the Committee. After each person had been down to the Committee meeting he was instructed by us to write an exact resume of what had transpired with all the questions and answers, and these were delivered to our Defense Committee. We studied these resumes for possible evidence of the trend of the Committee’s inquiry so that we could better arm the next batch of teachers to be called.

It was while I was going over these stories that I realized for the first time just how important a part of the communist movement in America the teachers were. They touched practically every phase of Party work. They were not used only as teachers in Party education, where they gave their services free of charge, but in the summer they traveled and visited Party figures in other countries.

Most of them were an idealistic, selfless lot who manned front committees and were the backbone of the Party’s strength in the Labor Party and later in the Progressive Party.

Even in the inner Party apparatus they performed invaluable services. They provided the Party with thousands of contacts among young people, women’s organizations, and professional groups. They were generous in helping finance Party activities. Some supported husbands who were Party organizers or on special assignment for the Party.

There is no doubt that the Rapp-Coudert investigation of New York City schools provided the legislature with a great deal of information on how Communists work. It also provided a good example of how they fight back, sometimes by a defensive fight against those conducting the investigation and with every weapon at the Party’s disposal, including smearing, name-calling, frame-up, careful combing of each investigator’s history and background. If there is nothing that can be attacked, then some innuendo is whispered which by repetition snowballs into a smear and makes the public say, “Where there is smoke there must be fire.”

Sometimes the campaign is on the offensive. Some angle is found to explain the evil motives of those who are conducting the investigation, perhaps to show that the investigation is itself a blind for some ulterior motive and that the result will deprive people of certain rights. In the teacher fight we steadfastly kept before the public the idea that the investigation was intended to rob the public schools of financial support and to promote religious and racial bigotry.

Little by little we won the campaign, at least in the opinion of many people; and we distracted the attention of the public from the specific work of the Committee. Support for the teachers, which at first had come only from the Communist Party, increased and included liberals, left trade unions, national group organizations, religious organizations, then political parties of the left, then leftwing Democrats, then so-called Progressive Republicans. All the support, however, was for tangential issues and not the basic issue. It did not matter to us so long as they marched at our side. Their reasons were unimportant to us.

The United States was in process of being coaxed into an alliance with England and France at this time. At first the Communist Party was in seeming opposition to this because of the Soviet-Nazi pact, and United Party members became anti-war. Party groups began making alliances with the most vicious pro-Hitler groups in America.

These communist activities of a low order always suck in those who begin as more or less sincere but misguided idealists but remain to follow the Party blindly. The Daily Worker editorials continuously blasted the Rapp-Coudert Committee as a technique of the warmongers.

The American Communists came close to pacifism in those days. This phase did not last, but in the course of it the Teachers Defense Committee published a book called Winter Soldiers, of which some ten thousand copies were printed. It was beautifully illustrated. We had cartoons contributed by leading artists because the proceeds were to go to the Defense Committee. But we were forced to desist from further distribution when we learned that the International Communist line had changed once again and the Party was now pro-war, as the Communist International had always intended that America should be.

The International had frightened the Western world by its alliance with Hitler; now the campaign to involve America in the world war was once again in full swing. This time the Party had some difficulty, because so many new friends of the Party found it difficult to swing nonchalantly from a support of pacifism to a support of war. Thousands of students under the impetus of the Communists had taken the Oxford oath against war.

Many had read with joy the anti-war poems of Mike Quinn, who had also provided the CIO with its slogan, “The Yanks are not coming.” Thousands of women had worked with the Party on its mass committees, such as the League against War and Fascism ~ a title which was later changed to American Committee for Peace and Democracy, and then to American Mobilization Committee.

In 1940 I had been selected by the Party to lead a committee called Women’s Trade Union Committee for Peace. We raised money, hired a young man to do public relations, and arranged a mass delegation to Washington. There we lobbied with representatives and senators. We went on the air wither-German speakers. We set up a continuous picket line in front of the White House.

It had been at this time that a final break came between my husband and me. For some time John had been disturbed by my increasing activity with the Communists. He himself was pro-British.

He had served in the Canadian Air Service during World War I until America’s entry. He despised what he called the “phony peace” campaigns. There were other and personal reasons why our marriage had not been successful, but the breaking point came at this time. He told me he was leaving for Florida to get a divorce.

I stayed on at our apartment in Perry Street. My mother had come to live with us some months before. I shuttled back and forth between Albany and New York that spring, devoting all my time to the Union and other Party causes. It was during these months that I developed my deepest loyalty to the Communist Party. In great part this was because I was grateful to them for their support of the teachers.

I still did not see communism as a conspiracy. I regarded it as a philosophy of life which glorified the “little people.” I was surrounded by people who called themselves Communists and who were warmhearted people like me. In the world outside there was immorality and decadence and injustice; there was no real standard to live by. But among the Communists I knew there was moral behavior according to well-defined standards and there was a semblance of order and certitude.

The rest of the world had become cold and chaotic to me. I heard talk of brotherhood, but I saw no evidence of it. In the group of Communists with which I worked I did find a community of interest.

In addition to the Teachers Union work I continued as an active leader of the American Labor Party. I was assigned to work with a committee to free the leaders of the Furriers Union who had been sent to prison for industrial sabotage. I organized a committee of women, including the wives of the imprisoned men, to visit congressmen and the Department of Justice.

We talked with Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt at her apartment on Eleventh Street. She graciously agreed to do all in her power to get our memoranda into the hands of the appropriate officials. She was sympathetic with the wives of the imprisoned men who had come with me.

Only one note in the interview disturbed me. The matter of the right of Communists to be leaders of trade unions had come up in the general discussion. Mrs. Roosevelt said that she believed Communists should be permitted to be members but not leaders of trade unions.

The position seemed illogical to me and I said so. Communism cannot be right for little people, for the workers, and wrong for the leaders. There can be only one moral code for all. Perhaps Mrs. Roosevelt, like myself and many other well-meaning people in America, has by this time learned that there is no halfway house in which you can meet the communist movement. Co-existence is not possible on any level.

In the summer of 1940 we attended the American Federation of Teachers convention in Buffalo, fearful of our welcome. It was almost ironic that once again we were at a convention at a time when the international communist scene was stirred by a dramatic event. The previous year we had heard of the signing of the Soviet-Nazi pact; now came news of the murder of Leon Trotsky in Mexico. The combined Socialists, Trotskyites, and Lovestone group practically held us responsible for this event.

But the real result of that 1940 convention was the fact that the George Counts group took control of the American Federation of Teachers and soon after the New York, Philadelphia, and other communist-led locals had their charters lifted. In New York the coveted charter of the American Federation of Teachers affiliation went to Dr. Lefkowitz and the new organization he had built, the Teachers Guild.

This automatically ended our formal relations with the A.F. of L. The New York Teachers Union was now an independent union not affiliated with either of the great labor movements. I thought bitterly of that convention in Madison when we would have been welcomed into the CIO, but the Party forbade it. The loss of the charter had come about chiefly as a result of the unfavorable publicity given us during the Rapp-Coudert investigation and by foreign events.

I returned to New York to learn more bad news. Nearly fifty of our teachers had been suspended from their jobs. But perhaps the greatest blow was the indictment of one of our teachers, Morris U. Schappes, on the charge of perjury. An English teacher at City College, an ardent Communist, himself a graduate of City College, he was the child of parents who lived close to want on the lower East Side.

With his devoted wife, Sonia, he lived as dedicated a life, that is, as dedicated to communism, as anyone I ever met. He was the flame that fired the City College boys, and the teachers, too, when their revolutionary devotion ebbed. Under the name of “Horton” he was the New York Party director of education while he was still teaching at City College. He had exercised tremendous influence on class after class in the college, and in the organizing of the college teachers into the Union he had worked indefatigably.

When he was subpoenaed by the Committee, it was decided that he should either refuse to answer certain questions and take a contempt citation with almost certain loss of his job, or resign from it. When I returned from Albany, I learned that the top-level committee in my absence had again changed the decision: he was to admit he was a Communist and say that he and three others published the Communist shop paper, the Pen and Hammer, which was circulated anonymously at City College.

The trouble was that the three Communists he named were either dead or gone from the college and the Coudert Committee was able to prove that his statement was a falsehood. Morris Schappes was indicted and brought to trial before judge Jonah Goldstein, remanded to the old Tombs, with bail set at ten thousand dollars.

When the doors of the dirty old rat-infested Tombs closed on him I hated the world I lived in. It didn’t seem possible that ordinary men could put a man in jail when his only desire was to improve the condition of the poor, when he gained nothing personally from his activities. I hated Tom Dewey, the district attorney, whom I blamed for the catastrophe. I hated the “system” which I thought was at the bottom of the tragedy. I went to Sonia and did what I could to help her.

We organized a committee for Schappes’ defense. We held a mass meeting in front of the New York Supreme Court in Foley Square and laid a wreath on the steps of the courthouse “in memory of academic freedom.” For this was the issue we injected into the Schappes case to gain public support. Meantime, I received ten thousand dollars in cash from one of the Party’s friends and Morris was out of jail pending appeals.

About this case there is still a certain irony. Schappes’ trial attorney, Edmund Kuntz, was one of the trial lawyers in the Rosenberg atom spy case. It is equally ironical that Morris Schappes was one of the teachers who inspired Julius Rosenberg at City College while he was a student there.

At the end of the trial Morris Schappes was convicted and sentenced to two to four years in state Prison.

A new period was at hand, a period of extremes, when the united front of Communists and the forces of national unity in the United States were to work together to win the war. Morris Schappes was forgotten except by his wife and a few loyal friends. The communist Party was now in coalition with the forces which had prosecuted Morris.

Late 1940 and early 1941 had been spent in endless preparation of the defenses of individuals who were brought up before the school boards for dismissals based on the Rapp-Coudert Committee findings. When the smoke cleared, we found there had been a loss of from forty to fifty positions in the city colleges and in the public schools. The Teachers Union had, by and large, withstood the attack.

Some loss of membership took place but we still had close to one thousand Party members in a union of about four thousand.

In February of 1941 my dearly loved mother was taken ill. The diagnosis was pneumonia. I was in Albany when word came. I hurried back to find to my distress that agents of the Rapp-Coudert Committee and overzealous newspaper reporters had broken into my apartment in search of teachers’ lists.

My mother, in her broken English, had informed them that I was away and would be glad to see them when I returned. She refused to let them look at any of my papers but they had pushed her aside and tried to take over. I was furious when I learned of this illegal invasion of my home. But everyone disclaimed responsibility and my chief concern at the moment was my mother.

She was seventy-six years old. She had always been strong in body and she had continued to have the lively mind of her earlier days. I had never seen her bored. Her one worry was that I worked too hard, and she often pleaded with me to relax, but I was driven by inner furies. I took no rest. I did not take vacations. I liked to say there was no vacation from the class struggle.

For a long time my activities had no meaning to my mother. All she knew was that I worked too hard. But she must have known something in her later days, for once she shook her head and looked at me sadly and said, “America does strange things to children.”

She died in my arms one night several weeks later. In the repose of death her face was lovely, and as I stood by her body I suddenly saw my mother in her big white sweater with loaves of bread in her hands, striding across the fields at Pilgrim’s Rest. All around her were the wild birds who knew she had come to feed them. She helped birds and animals and children and grownups. I would miss her greatly.

Services for her were held at the Church of Our Lady of Pompeii on Bleecker Street. There were not many people in the church with me, but Beatrice came and some of the Party teachers were there, people alien to this house of God. They came to comfort my loss. I was deeply touched.

My mother was buried in St. Peter’s Cemetery in Poughkeepsie beside my father and I came back to New York. Now I was entirely alone. My personal life seemed completely at an end and I belonged only to the cause I served.

I moved out of the apartment because I could not bear its loneliness. I found a tiny, inexpensive one on Horatio Street on the top floor of an old house near the Hudson River.

There was a window beside my bed and from it I could see the morning sky when I woke up. Sometimes I thought, as I lay there, how long a way I had come to loneliness. How far behind me was the room in the embrace of the horse chestnut tree in the house with my mother and my father and the children of our family, and where I had planned my future.

I still had a room and I still had a family. The room was far different from the one at Pilgrim’s Rest and my family was a great, impersonal family. In its midst I could find forgetfulness when my body was completely spent and my brain was weary.

CHAPTER TEN

It was the summer of 1941. The Teachers Union hoped that the American Federation of Teachers at its convention would grant readmission to our local. We therefore elected a full delegation and sent it to Detroit, the convention city. But those who now controlled the American Federation of Teachers were hardly aware of any change in the situation. Having expelled the Communists the previous year, they were not ready to sit down to a peaceful convention with them this year. They refused to seat the delegates of the expelled locals.

We held a rival convention across the street. We made speeches, and many delegates from the regular convention came to listen to us. But we returned to New York without having realized our objective.

On the way back to New York, a number of delegates, including Dale Zysman and myself, were in the same train with Dr. Counts and Professor Childs, top men of the American Federation of Teachers. Dale, always an excellent mixer, went over to sit down with them and talked of possible future readmission. Both professors thought it proper that the United States should become an ally of the USSR but they felt that the American Communist Party should be disbanded. This was a political philosophy I did not understand at the time. Later that year the same two men published a book entitled America, Russia and the Communist Party in the Post-War World, a fulsome eulogy of the Soviet Union with an appeal for co-operation in war and in peace between the United States and the USSR.

But they called for disbanding of the Communist Party.

That fall I was still trying to find jobs for teachers who had lost their positions in the Rapp-Coudert fight. A number of those suspended were still awaiting departmental trials.

The Party was no longer interested in them. Its new line was a united front with all the “democratic forces” ~ meaning all the pro-war forces.

Before June 1941 it had been an “imperialist war” for the re-division of markets, a war which could have only reactionary results. But when the Soviet Union was attacked, the war was transformed into a “people’s war,” a “war of liberation.”

The American Communist Party dropped all its campaigns of opposition. Its pacifist friends were again “Fascist reactionaries” and all its energy was employed in praise of France and England as great democracies. The fight against the Board of Higher Education had to be brought to an end because the Party regarded Mayor LaGuardia as a force in the pro-democratic war camp.

Through an intermediary we offered to make a wholesale deal on the balance of cases remaining untried before the Board of Higher Education. We were unsuccessful and had to deal with the cases one by one.

In the legislative program of the Teachers Union for 1941 I included a proposal to establish public nursery schools. The WPA nursery-school program which had been under the State Department of Education was coming to an end. The bill I introduced for the Union was mild. It was conceived mainly as a program of jobs for teachers and partly as a social program to aid working women with small children. The storm of opposition from conservative groups startled me. Evidently I had stumbled on a controversial issue, one which struck at the role of the mother in education.

I, myself, had given educational policy scant attention. Little that was controversial had been included in my education courses at Hunter College, and in my graduate work I had steered clear of such courses, feeling that my main emphasis must be on subject matter. I held to an old-fashioned theory that if a teacher knew her subject, and had a few courses in psychology and liked young people, she should be able to teach. I had been horrified to see teachers, who were going to teach mathematics or history or English, spend all the time of their graduate work in courses on methods of teaching.

On December 7, 1941, I called together a few outstanding citizens to discuss the program of school expansion and to solicit support for nursery schools and better adult education. The meeting was held at the home of Mrs. Elinor Gimbel, a public-spirited woman, interested in many causes. With us was Stanley Isaacs, liberal Republican from Manhattan’s silk-stocking district, which was headed by Senator Coudert. Also present was judge Anna Kross, Commissioner of Correction in New York City; Kenneth Leslie, former editor of the magazine The Protestant; and Elizabeth Hawes, fashionable dressmaker and author of Fashion Is Spinach.

We had enjoyed Mrs. Gimbel’s hospitality and talked about discrimination, about the new waves of population in New York, about the conflict with Catholics on federal aid, about budgets, school buildings, and teachers’ salaries. As I look back over the conferences I attended on educational policies and methods and progress, I realize that we never discussed or thought about what kind of man or woman we expected to develop by our educational system.

What were the goals of education? How were we to achieve them? These questions few asked. Are we asking them today in the higher echelons of the public schools, and what are our conclusions?

Only recently I heard the chief of the New York public schools speak on television on juvenile delinquency. It was soon after the wrecking of a school by young vandals. He said that what was needed was more buildings, more teachers, better playgrounds. Those devoted to progressive education and to preparing youth to live in the “new socialist world” are abstractly sure of what they want, but they seem not to know that they work with human beings. Aside from teaching that children must learn to get along with other children, no moral or natural law standards are set. There is no word about how our children are to find the right order of harmonious living. I, too, had to learn by hard experience that you cannot cure a sick soul with more buildings or more playgrounds. These are important, but they are not enough. Abraham Lincoln, schooled in a one room log cabin, received from education what all the athletic fields and laboratories cannot give. All his speeches reflected his love for his Creator. He knew that God is the cure for godlessness.

On this Sunday afternoon of December 7, 1941, we talked long and ardently on education. We talked, too, of the splendid work done by the women of England for the safety of their children in preparation for bombing attacks. Mrs. Gimbel finally turned on the radio to give us the news. And as the first sounds carne we heard an excited voice announcing that Pearl Harbor had been bombed by Japanese planes. The distant calamity in Europe which we had been discussing in this pleasant room was now ours. We listened appalled as the voice told us the full horror of what had happened.

When the news announcement was over, we looked at each other in silence for a few minutes.

We were people of many races and religions and parties, but we were of one mind on America. So it was only natural that we immediately set to work to make plans, and that these plans dealt with children. Then and there we formed ourselves into an emergency Child Care Committee with Mrs. Gimbel as chairman, and to this committee I promised to turn over my files on nursery schools and to give all my assistance.

In the Party we had long expected that the war would involve the United States. In fact, earlier in the summer the Party had ominously turned its Committee on Peace into the American Mobilization Committee (for war), and in September we had held a huge outdoor meeting at the Brooklyn Velodrome. I was one of the speakers. The keynote of the meeting was the coming war and how to meet it.

The energies of the Party were now turned to establishing win-the-war committees. The old feuds of the Teachers Union and the CIO and the A.F. of L. were put into moth balls and the little arguments and the big ones were forgotten. Now the Communists became peacemakers between discordant factions everywhere. With joy and relief I watched the Party serve as an agency for drawing the forces of the community together to win the war.

Of course the Communist Party was overjoyed at what was happening. It moved briskly to place the colossal strength of America at the disposal of the Soviet Union. Moreover, the rank-and-file Communists were once again tasting the joy of being accepted by all groups. The Party line made it possible during this period for ordinary Party members to be merely human beings and to act naturally, for their neighbors were now less frightened, and even listened to Communists explain that they were on the side of the American people. All American groups worked together now on Red Cross committees, on bond rallies, on blood-bank drives. We were one people united in a common cause.

It is bitter for me to realize that Communist Party leaders looked upon this united front as only ataxic to disrupt this country, and that they were using the good instincts of their own members for their ultimate destruction. Under the deceptive cloak of unity they moved like thieves in the night, stealing materials and secrets. Each Communist Party member was used as a part of the conspiracy, but the majority of them were unaware of it. Only those who knew the pattern knew how each fitted in the picture.

I had stayed close to the Party during the worst days of 1939 to 1941, the days of the Soviet-Nazi pact, primarily because I deeply loved the Teachers Union which I represented. My love for it was no abstract emotion. I felt affection for all its members, the strong and the weak, the arrogant and the humble. I identified myself with them. The kind of sensitivity some people have for their church or their nation I had for the Union. I grew closer to the Party because it was endlessly solicitous of the teachers’ problems and gave us favorable publicity and supported our campaigns.

The second reason was because of the Party’s campaign against war. I now know that this antiwar policy was merely a tactic to meet changing conditions. At that time I could not believe that the communist line was a scheme advancing Communists one more step closer to total war for total control of the world. I had slowly come to believe in the infallibility of “scientific socialism” and in the inevitability of the socialist millennium. I was by no means oblivious to many signs of crudeness, corruption, and selfishness within the Party but I thought the movement was a bigger thing.

I, and hundreds like me, believed in Stachel and Foster, Browder and Stalin, and the Politburo, and the great Party of the Soviet Union. We felt they were incorruptible. Blind faith in the Soviet Union, the land of true socialism, was the last spell that was broken for me. This had been a spell woven of words cleverly strung together by Party intellectuals who lied, and it was made plausible by my desire to see man-made perfection in this imperfect world.

During this period Rose Wortis, a woman of the ascetic type, much like Harriet Silverman, self-effacing, devoted, tireless in her work, a willing cog in the machine of professional revolutionaries, was supervising me while I prepared a leaflet for the Women’s Trade Union Committee for Peace. I had included a statement against the Nazis, which Rose crossed out as she corrected it, and she said: “Why do you say that? We do not emphasize that during this period.”

I was shocked at this, but, unwilling to believe its implications; I excused it on the ground that she was merely a petty functionary. On a higher level, I was sure, no one would make so gross an error. Later on I had a chance to see the higher level.

I was so completely involved with the Party now that it absorbed all my spare time. Its members were my associates and friends. I had no others.

To this was added one other factor, one not to be minimized: I was rising in importance in this strange world. I had joined as an idealist. Now I was beginning to stay because of the sense of power it gave me, and the chance of participation in significant events.

Like others I had known I was now wearing myself out with devotion and work. I became sharp and critical of those who did not pour themselves as completely into the Party. I still based activity only own standards of goodness, of honesty, and of loyalty. I failed to understand that the Party in making alliances had nothing whatever to do with these qualities, that it was not out to reform the world, but was bent on making a revolution to control the world.

I did not know then that to do so it was ready to use cutthroats, liars, and thieves as well as saints and ascetics. I should have known, however, had I reflected on the implications of Lenin’s speech delivered at the Third All-Russian Congress of the Russian Young Communist League on October 2, 1920: “. . . all our morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

If, occasionally, I saw things that made me uneasy, I rationalized that the times demanded such actions. Once I was startled from this calm assumption. A group of Party and trade-union leaders met in a private home in Greenwich Village to talk with Earl Browder, then leader of the Communist Party, concerning Vito Marcantonio and his work with the Party, and especially in regard to coming elections. Present were several members of the Politburo and a score of communist union leaders of the A.F. of L. and the CIO.

Marcantonio was in a very special relation to the Communist Party. As a voice in Congress he was indispensable. Because he was a close friend of Mayor LaGuardia he helped give the Party strength. At the same time he provided support for the mayor because he was the latter’s personal representative in East Harlem. Through him the mayor retained connections with a section of city politics which no mayor dares overlook. But Marcantonio did not maintain his hold on his congressional district without the Communist Party.

At the meeting we discussed nominations for representative-at-large for New York. Some of us had recommended endorsement of a Republican who had served in the State Senate on the Republican and Labor tickets, a man who had ably represented the East Harlem area. Marcantonio at that time was in alliance with Tammany Hall, and he insisted on the endorsement of a candidate who had a bad voting record and was more often absent from his desk in Congress than present.

In my naiveté I thought that all we had to do was to show the Party leadership his voting record and the Party would support the better-qualified candidate. But the answer to our request was a flat “no” from Browder. We were ordered not to interfere with the decisions of Marcantonio. I sat in utter surprise at this command, for I had believed firmly that Party decisions were arrived at democratically.

Even worse was the next thing to occur. Important trade-union leaders began to complain about what they termed unreasonable demands made on their unions by Marcantonio. When they had finished, Browder told them bluntly that anyone who opposed Marcantonio was expendable. I watched the union leaders listen as the Party leader delivered his edict. They looked like whipped curs. There was a short silence after Browder finished, and I saw these men of importance in their unions begin to explain away their opposition, to laugh nervously about nothing, to accept a decision they had previously sworn they would never accept.

With a sinking heart I accepted it, too, and promptly began to rationalize: it was no doubt all due to some exigency of practical politics about which I knew nothing. The incident, however, left me with a lasting residue of resentment.

In 1942, I myself was thrown into the heart of violent left-wing politics. During the days of the Soviet-Nazi pact the bitterest fight of all was the one between the Social Democrats and the Communists for control of the American Labor Party, which had become the balance of power in New York State.

The Democratic Party could not carry the state without the support of the Labor Party.

The Republicans could not carry the state without splitting this new political force. Those trained in the left-wing school of politics were showing an aptitude for practical politics which put the old machine politicians out of the running.

The Social Democrats under the leadership of Alex Rose of the Millinery Union and of David Dubinsky of the Ladies Garment Workers Union had originally collaborated in the building of the American Labor Party. By vying with each other in making alliances with the Democrats and the Republicans for successive elections, each group obtained for its followers certain places on the ballot which would insure election if the joint slate was victorious.

In 1937 and 1939 the combined American Labor Party forces had been successful in getting posts in city and state elections. With the coming of the Soviet-Nazi pact the Social Democrats began campaign against the Communists both in the unions and in the American Labor Party. Because the Communists had wooed the intellectuals and liberals who were in the Labor Party; because of the Party’s alliance with Marcantonio’s East Harlem machine (a personal machine); because of Party strength in the new CIO unions, the Party-supported candidates were victorious in several primary fights. Thus they had by 1942 dislodged the Social Democrats from control of the Labor Party in every borough except Brooklyn.

The spring primaries of that year saw a bitter fight between these two factions for the control of Brooklyn. I was established by the Party in headquarters at the Piccadilly Hotel as secretary of committee, ubiquitously called the Trade Union Committee to Elect Win-the-War candidates. I had the job assigned me of applying the Party whip to various left-wing unions for money, and forces, for the elections.

The committee devoted its energy to two campaigns: to defeat the Dubinsky forces in Brooklyn, and to win the nomination for Marcantonio in all three political parties in his congressional district. Hews running in the Republican, Democrat, and Labor party primaries.

The communist wing of the American Labor Party won the primary elections in Brooklyn after a bitter fight which included an appeal to the courts. Marcantonio won the primary in all three parties after the expenditure of incredible sums of money and the utilization of an unbelievable number of union members mobilized by the Party as canvassers in his district.

Every night thousands of men and women combed the East Harlem district house by house. The voters were visited many times. On the first visit they were asked to sign pledges to vote for Marcantonio on a specific party ticket. Next they were reminded by a caller of the date of the primary.

And on the day itself they were visited every hour until they went to the polls. Squads of automobiles waited to take them. Teachers acted as baby sitters. People who would have scorned working for a Republican or Democratic leader, willingly and without recompense, did the most menial tasks because the Party had told them that this was the way to defeat the “fascists.”

Call it mass hypnosis if you like, but the important thing is to recognize this appeal to the good in human beings and to realize how it can be used.

Hundreds of members of the Teachers Union were assigned to Puerto Rican and Negro districts where they helped people take literacy tests. They manned the polls. They spoke on street corners during the campaign and listened in ecstasy to Marcantonio, who ended all his speeches with “Long live a free Puerto Rico,” a rallying cry which had absolutely nothing to do with the primary elections.

By the end of the primary campaign I was exhausted. Yet I went back to the Teachers Union office and worked during the hot summer days to help the skeleton force working there. I think we were the only teacher organization which made a practice of keeping some activity going all summer.

We gave social affairs for out-of-town teachers at Columbia and New York University. We serviced the summer schoolteachers and substitutes and we prepared for the coming school term.

In that year the American Labor Party decided to support the Democratic candidate, Jerry Finkelstein, against Frederic Coudert for the State Senate. The Teachers Union responded to the appeal for help. The senatorial district was a peculiar one, consisting of three assembly districts, the famous Greenwich Village Tenth, the silk-stocking Fifteenth, and the Puerto Rican East Harlem Seventeenth.

Extremes of wealth and poverty were encompassed in these districts, from fabulous Park Avenue homes to rat and vermin-infested tenements. The Communist Party released all teacher comrades from other assignments to let them work on this campaign.

I was moved into a suite of offices at the Murray Hill Hotel on Park Avenue and we established a front committee there made up of outstanding citizens. “The Allied Voters Against Coudert” was officially under the chairmanship of a fine and intelligent woman, Mrs. Arthur Garfield Hayes. It included people such as Louis Bromfield, Samuel Barlow, and scores of other respectable people.

One of the attorneys for Amtorg, the Soviet business organization, contributed money and also information helpful to the campaign against Coudert. There was hardly any Democratic organization in the silk-stocking district, and the one in the Village was reputedly tied so closely with the Republicans that we established our own. This left the Democratic organization in East Harlem, which was increasingly under Marcantonio’s control, as the key to the election. The contest would be won or lost in that district.

I soon realized that Marcantonio, who had won the primary in all three parties, was not fighting too hard to carry the district for the American Labor Party against Coudert. He did not care which party won; he was the candidate in all three. Besides, Mayor LaGuardia was pledged to do all he could for Senator Coudert and Marcantonio was responsive to the mayor’s requests. But Marcantonio promised help, and we made some money available for the leaders of his machine.

My worst fears were confirmed when I listened to the election returns and knew we had lost. I did not mind the loss of the silk-stocking district. But to lose Marcantonio’s district was a blow to my faith in individual people in this strange left-wing world.

That night Harry, one of Marc’s old captains, drove me home. I was depressed, not only because of the loss of the election, but because of the lesson I had learned. We stopped at the Village Vanguard and there met Tom O’Connor, labor editor of P.M., a good friend of mine, and one of the human people in the Party. He looked at me, but I said nothing. He knew what had happened.

When the Vanguard closed, Tom and I walked downtown to City Hall through the empty streets. We talked of the “movement” and of the strange dead ends it often led to.

We talked of the opportunists who cluttered the road to that Mecca of perfection on which we still fixed our eyes. We walked across Brooklyn Bridge just as dawn was breaking. Tom put me in a taxi. When I reached home, I went to bed and slept twice around the clock

 

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The war years made everything seem unreal, even the Party. There was, however, no lack of activity and sometimes the Party had an important part in it.

The leaders of our Teachers Union were unhappy because they were without labor affiliations; therefore I negotiated for affiliation with another communist-led union, the State County and Municipal Workers. We had been Local 5 of the A.F. of L.; now we became Local 555 of the CIO.

The Union set up new headquarters at 13 Astor Place in a building once owned by the Alexander Hamilton Institute and later owned by a corporation controlled by one of the wealthiest communist-led unions, Local 65 of the Warehousemen’s Union. It had renamed the building Tom Mooney Hall. Local 65 was renting floors to unions and left-wing organizations. The State County and Municipal Workers were on the seventh floor. The Teachers Union took over the fifth floor. It gave us plenty of space for professional and social activities.

The Union had assumed the obligation of helping the teachers and professors displaced by theRapp-Coudert Committee, which was proving difficult to do. Finally, after brooding over this problem, we decided to establish a liberal school for adults, thus making employment and spreading education at the same time.

The School for Democracy was established with Dr. Howard Selsam, formerly of the Philosophy Department of Brooklyn College, as director, and with David Goldway, formerly of Townsend Harris High School and also formerly state director of education for the Communist Party in New York, as secretary. It was to be housed also at 13 Astor Place and to use certain facilities jointly with the Teachers Union. I worked hard to get it organized.

The school was a success. Almost immediately our science teachers received well-paying jobs in experimental laboratories. But the Party observed our venture into education and made ready to bend it to its purposes.

Attached to the Party for some time had been a school called the Workers School, located at Party headquarters. This school was conducted by the Party for members and sympathizers. Its curriculum consisted largely of courses in Marxism-Leninism, courses in trade-union history, and courses in popularizing the current line of the Party. The school was frankly one for communist indoctrination and no compromise was made with bourgeois educational concepts. The school had foreign atmosphere about it. It was run by old-time Communists, half-affectionately and half contemptuously referred to as the “Nineteen Fivers.”

Earl Browder and the national leadership were busy striving to give the Communist Party the appearance of a native American party to prepare it for its new role in the war and in the postwar period when it was expected to play an even greater role. He was enthusiastic about the School for Democracy.

Often I had the feeling he was impatient with the overwhelming foreignness of the Party.

Perhaps his days as child and young man in Kansas had had something to do with it. His slogan, “Communism Is Twentieth Century Americanism,” had irked both the foreign-minded Communists and the native Americans who had felt it was an attempt to sell a bogus article. But with the war Browder could work with impunity to convert the Party into an acceptable American social and political organization.

In line with this it was decided to take over the School for Democracy with its core of professors, graduates of the most distinguished bourgeois colleges, and to join it to the hard core of communist teachers from the Workers School. Alexander Trachtenberg was put in charge of committee to merge the Workers School and the School for Democracy. An astute Communist, charter member of the Party and before that a revolutionary socialist, Trachtenberg was and is now one of the financial big wheels of the movement. He was also chief of the firm of International Publishers, which had a monopoly on the publication of communist books and pamphlets and on the distribution of Soviet books and pamphlets. This is a highly profitable undertaking.

He bought a beautiful building on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Sixth Avenue, a stone’s throw from St. Francis Xavier School, to house the new Marxist School. Plans were already on foot for a string of Marxist Adult Education schools which would have a patriotic look. The patriots of the American Revolution and of the Civil War were to be given a new sort of honor ~ a Marxist status.

The new school in New York was named the Jefferson School of Social Research. In Chicago the school was named the Abraham Lincoln School, in Boston the John Adams School, and in New Rochelle, the Thomas Paine School. These schools were to play a part in the “third revolution” that was to destroy the nation.

Trachtenberg once said to me that when communism came to America it would come under the label of “progressive democracy.” “It will come,” he added, “in labels acceptable to the American people.”

The initial funds for the setting up of the Marxist schools were, ironically enough, contributed by wealthy business people who were personally invited to attend dinners at the homes of other men of wealth. They came to hear Earl Browder analyze current events and predict the future with emphasis on the role the Party would play.

There is no doubt that Earl Browder, as chief of the Communist Party, was close to the seats of world power in those days, and that he knew better than most Americans what was going on, except insofar as events were warped and refracted by his Marxist ideology. The men who paid their hundred dollar admissions and contributed thus to the school funds became part of the group which Earl Browder was to call the “progressive businessmen,” meaning those who were willing to go along on an international program of communism.

The lure was attractive: expanded profits from trade with the Soviets. The price to be paid was unimportant to these well-fed, well-heeled men, who felt the world was their oyster. The price was respectability for communism at home and leadership of the Soviets abroad.

I had no part in the group which planned this new Marxist educational empire, though I had been the moving spirit in establishing the School for Democracy. The trustees of the Jefferson School were not educators; they were key communist figures in the growing hierarchy of a native American leadership for the Communist Party. There were among them people with unbelievable backgrounds, some of them Moscow-trained, but they all had a surface of respectability, even though sometimes a blurred surface.

As I look back I see that I never ceased keeping for myself a small area of freedom into which my mind could escape. Some phases of my life I was perfectly willing to have controlled and even enslaved. I was conditioned to accept the view that the capitalist system was inefficient, greedy, immoral, and decadent. My schools and my reading and the depression had put me in agreement with President Roosevelt in wanting to drive the moneychangers from the Temple.

I was also willing to follow the Party in its program of practical politics, for here, too, the attack was upon the grossness and stupidity of those in government who sat in the seats of power with no plan for the future. Willingly, too, I helped the Party gain in power in the field of American education through my work with the Teachers Union. I was always ready to help in the struggle for admission to the academic world of the intellectuals among our immigrant population who felt they faced discrimination.

But I was wary of the Party’s inner educational apparatus. I was not drawn to the dogmatic pedants of the Party’s schools. No doubt, subconsciously, I realized that all this was not education but propaganda, and at heart I was really still a student and a teacher. I wanted to read Marx and Engels and Lenin, but not under the tutelage of those drab, self-effacing figures who peopled the Party’s educational quarters.

The Party leaders made frequent attempts to get me to attend state and national training schools.

I was approached repeatedly about the possibility of going to school in Moscow, but I always pleaded that the immediate emergencies of my work in the Union made it impossible for me to give time to such a duty. “Perhaps someday,” I told them.

I had seen teachers, sailors, furriers, subway conductors, housewives, some with third-grade education and some with college degrees, lumped together as students in these state and national training schools and I had seen them come out with the same stamp of dedicated uniformity. It was a leveling process that still gave them an odd sense of superiority, as if they were now priests of a new cult.

With the development of the new Marxist schools I tended to withdraw further from this phase of the work. I taught one class at the Jefferson School, but I found no joy in it.

When I was offered the directorship of the California Labor School I refused it without hesitation. I had the vague fear that if I allowed myself to be drawn into this type of indoctrination the last small refuge where my mind found freedom would be gone.

The war years had produced interesting phenomena in communist-led left-wing circles, not the least of which was public renunciation of the class struggle. The Party announced that whole sections of the capitalist class had joined the “democratic front,” the so-called “Roosevelt camp of progress.”

The Daily Worker never wearied of enumerating those who were clasping hands in a common purpose, Communists, trade unions, sections of the Democratic Party, and progressive capitalists.

These made a coalition, the Party stated, that would win the war and later the peace.

The Communist Party now assumed the responsibility for establishing a rigid discipline over the working class. No employer was more effective or more relentless in checking strikes among the workers, or in minimizing complaints of workers against inequities of wages and working conditions.

Some employers were delighted with this assistance. It is startling to note that, while wages rose a little during those years, they did not compare with the rise in profits and in monopoly control of basic necessities.

In other circumstances, Communists would have blasted the fact that war production was chiefly in the hands of ten large corporations and that 80 per cent of the war production was in the hands of a hundred firms. Now the Communists carefully muted such information. Instead, they played on the workers’ feelings of patriotism.

It was sad to observe that in the interest of its objectives the Party even barred the protests of the Negro workers who felt that, now that they were needed in the war factories, they might win some rights. The Communists opposed the Negro demands violently. In fact, a campaign of vilification was begun. It was charged that the leaders of this Negro movement were Japanese agents.

The Party did all it could to induce women to go into industry. Its fashion designers created special styles for them and its song writers wrote special songs to spur them. Use of womanpower in the war industries was, of course, inevitable, but it also fitted into the communist long-range program. War-period conditions, they planned, were to become a permanent part of the future educational program. The bourgeois family as a social unit was to be made obsolete.

After the Teheran conference, the Party program for shelving strikes was projected into a permanent no-strike policy. Each time American political leaders emerged from an international conference, Crimea, Teheran, and Yalta, the Communist Party announced again its dedication to the win-the ~ war plan. Its leaders were driving for a strong war and peace unity between the United States and the Soviet Union. Everywhere the Party leadership was being placed in positions of importance so that they might direct the home-front segments of the coalition. Communist leadership was being consulted and utilized by those in power in government.

The drive for the second front brought Earl Browder into national prominence, and we realized that he was being consulted by such national leaders as Sumner Welles. Government officials we reutilizing Communists to pull together divergent groups.

When the Russian War Relief was begun, a glittering array of names of outstanding citizens adorned its elegant stationery. Sumptuous affairs launched Russian relief in America. These were attended by people prominent in society and government.

The Communist Party made the most of this. Now there emerged the Russian Institute with its imposing headquarters on Park Avenue. This was a sophisticated propaganda agency; it brought American educators, public officials, artists, and young people of families of wealth into this left-wing world. Famous names, Vanderbilt, Lamont, Whitney, Morgan, mingled with those of communist leaders. The Russian Institute was so respectable that it was allowed to give in-service courses to New York City schoolteachers for credit.

In Albany and in Washington a new crop of young, native American Communists swarmed into the legislative halls as legislative representatives and public-relation and research aides to legislators.

With inside information on what was happening, they were able to guide legislators in the direction of Soviet-American unity. They helped to produce dozens of important public figures at Madison Square Garden rallies, organized under various labels but filled by the rank and file of devoted Party members. It was a glittering society that was emerging, made up of Russian diplomats and Russian business agents, of Americans in evening clothes, and artistic Bohemians in careless dungarees, all of them cheering the repeated avowals of friendship with the Soviet Motherland.

When in 1943 Stalin announced the dissolution of the Communist International, a great impetus was given to the drive to build the Communist Party into a native American party. This dissolution was a tactic meant to lessen fear in those Americans who did not believe that Soviet-American unity could be achieved without danger to American sovereignty.

When I arrived in Albany for the legislative session of 1943 I was besieged with questions.

Everywhere I explained the new policy of peace, the new era that was coming to the world because of this communist policy of amity. When some days later I spoke at a budget hearing to a packed hall, ostensibly for my Union, I was in reality putting across the Party’s unity line in terms of the taxation problem.

I received congratulations from Republicans, Democrats, and representatives of the taxpayers’ organization. Afterward Gil Green, New York State chairman of the Communist Party, and Si Gerson, its legislative representative, congratulated me on my speech. Then Gil said decidedly: “The time has come, Bella, when you ought to come forward openly as a leader of the Party.” Si Gerson, he added, was going into the Army soon and there would be need of a new legislative representative of the Party.“And we want you.”

We had supper in the grill at the De Witt Clinton Hotel and there we were joined by CIO men, by local labor lawyers, and a representative of the Farmers Union. My favorite waiter, a Party member, took our order. I was only half-listening to the talk of the people milling around our table, for Gil Green had startled me by his abrupt suggestion, which I knew was almost a command. I liked Gil. He wore shabby, worn suits and he reminded me of Harriet Silverman and Rose Wortis and the other self-sacrificing, dedicated people.

In the Party I was beginning to see many people of a different stripe. During the war period I saw how opportunism and selfishness engulfed many comrades. They wore expensive clothes, lived in fine apartments, and took long vacations at places provided by men of wealth.

There was, for one, William Wiener, former treasurer of the Party, manipulator for a score of business enterprises, who wore Brooks Brothers suits, smoked expensive cigars, and lunched only at the best places.

There were the trade union Communists who rubbed elbows with underworld characters at communist-financed nightclubs, and labor lawyers who were given patronage by the Party by assignment to communist-led trade unions and now were well established and comfortable.

But it was shabby, serious-faced Gil Green who was for me a visible reassurance that the Communist Party was still what I had originally thought it. His proposal had come to me at a time when I was tired of the varying grades of protection which the Party gave to its members, and tired of seeing the comfortable way of life of some who were in powerful places, where they had the support of the Party but faced none of the disadvantages of belonging to it.

Before I left him I promised Gil that I would think seriously about his proposal. I had personal problems to consider if I took it, for it was in a way an irrevocable step.

For one thing, I would be giving up a certain area of freedom, since I would be giving up fields of work not open to an avowed Communist.

In everything except name I was a Communist. I accepted discipline and attended meetings. I gave a full measure of devotion to Party works, and I felt a deep attachment and loyalty to the people in its ranks. I considered myself as part of a group looking and driving toward the day when socialism would triumph.

Even more significant was the fact that I had made their hates my hates. This was what established me as a full-fledged Communist. In the long ago I had been unable to hate anyone; I suffered desperately when someone was mistreated; I was regarded as a peacemaker. Now, little belittle, I had acquired a whole mass of people to hate: the groups and individuals who fought the Party.

How it came about I cannot tell. All I know as I look back to that time is that my mind had responded to Marxist conditioning. For it is a fact, true and terrible, that the Party establishes such authority over its members that it can swing their emotions now for and now against the same person or issue. It claims such sovereignty even over conscience as to dictate when it shall hate.

Before 1935, for instance, the Party had preached hatred of John L. Lewis as a labor dictator. No stories about him were too vile. He was accused of murder and pillage in his march to power in the Miners Union. Suddenly, in 1936, Lewis became the hero of the Communist Party. Again in 1940, when the Party decided to support Roosevelt against Willkie, and John L. Lewis risked his leadership in the CIO by calling on the unions to vote for Willkie, the Communists screamed invective, and in private meetings Roy Hudson and William Z. Foster, in charge of labor for the Politburo, vilified Lewis.

When the Communists shifted their support, Lewis was dropped as president of the CIO and Philip Murray was elected in his place. During my years in the Teachers Union I gradually got used to these bitter expressions of hate. And since hate begets hate, often those under attack also responded with hate. Hearing them, I began to take sides and in the end accepted the Party’s hates as my own.

Once at the national convention of the American Federation of Teachers in 1938 I was assigned to attack a resolution introduced by the socialists in support of a Fred Beals, once a Communist, and indicted for murder in the Gastonia textile strike. He had jumped bail and escaped to Russia but he did not like life in the Soviet Union and insisted on returning to the United States even though it meant standing trial. The socialists were defending him and asking trades-union support for him because the indictment had grown out of a labor dispute.

I did not know Fred Beals, and from a purely labor point of view I should have been sympathetic. Instead, I accepted the assignment to speak against the resolution to help him. I had begun to adopt the hates of a group.

This is the peculiar paradox of modern totalitarianism. This is the key to the mental enslavement of mankind: that the individual is made into nothing, that he operates as the physical part of what is considered a higher group intelligence and acts at the will of that higher intelligence, that he has no awareness of the plans the higher intelligence has for utilizing him. 

When a person conditioned by a totalitarian group talks about the right not to incriminate himself, he really means the right not to incriminate the communist group of which he is only a nerve end. When he talks of freedom of speech, he means freedom for the communist group to speak as a group through the mouth of the individual who has been selected by the higher intelligence.

The Bill of Rights of the American Constitution was written to protect individuals against centralized power. The Communists pervert this safeguard by first enslaving the individual so that he becomes the marionette of the centralized power.

This kind of conditioning had something to do with my decision to become a card-carrying Communist. In March, 1943, I gave my consent to Gil Green’s proposal to become an open Party leader. I took over Si Gerson’s position as legislative representative for the New York district. Gil was pleased and insisted that I begin the transition immediately, so I spent some time in Party headquarters and attended all meetings.

Now I found myself faced with two tasks: to prepare myself for my new life, and to affect an orderly withdrawal from the Teachers Union.

For several years I had purposely helped to bring forward new Party members for posts of responsibility in the Teachers Union leadership. One of these was Rose Russell, who had taught French in Thomas Jefferson High School. Rose had a fine mind and had had some training in newspaper work.

She had a human approach to people and problems. She was not as yet stamped into the obvious Communist Party mold. She was personable and well-liked, and the old guard in the Party fraction in the Union would not, I knew, dare oppose her openly. She was my choice as successor to the post I had loved, and with the approval of Gil and Rose Wortis we got the necessary approval by the communist leadership of the teachers. It was then an easy matter to bring her forth as a candidate for the Union elections of 1944.

Technically I was to remain as the legislative representative of the Teachers Union until the elections were held and until Rose Russell was installed publicly. The Union gave a farewell affair inky honor in June 1944. It was a fine illustration of the kind of unity which this Union, now a sturdy arm of the Communist Party, was able to establish.

The farewell party was called “A Tribute to Dear Bella.” As I read today the blurbs on the program I can but shake my head sadly. I read there of the “inspiring and untiring leadership in behalf of all the children ~ all the teachers ~ the improvement in public education ~ the fight against racial intolerance.” The chairman was my old friend, Professor Margaret Schlauch of New York University.

Telegrams were read from scores of assemblymen and state senators, from trade-union leaders, both communist and noncommunist, congressmen, and judges. On the platform were outstanding leaders come to honor me, for I had won many of these people to a tolerance for the Union by a sincere espousal of the needs of the schools. Among the people who greeted me were Charles Hendley, Honorable Hulan Jack, then in the Assembly, and Judge Anna Kross, whom I had grown to respect and love.

Rose Russell presented me with a gift from the Union, a modernistic water color which still hangs on my law-office wall. It is a good reminder, in its complete confusion of subject matter, of the distortion of the actual, the confusion and meaninglessness of this part of my life.