Addiction to Communism is like addiction to drugs—the victim resists the cure and is reluctant to admit the destructive side of his habit.
My withdrawal symptoms manifested themselves in prolonged periods of mental anguish which made me shun contacts with the outside world. My companionship was limited to my wife—my old—time girl friend from the days long past. She had consented to marry me even though she knew I had no prospects of a job, that in the months until the fur season opened up we’d have to exist on my remaining savings from my foreman days which by then had shrunk to less than two hundred dollars. She had no job either and we lived in a furnished room on a carefully planned subsistence level, limiting ourselves to a strict budget of ten dollars a week out of which rent took four, to a diet of soup and cheap staples with an occasional splurge of a Sunday meal at Stewart’s Cafeteria. For newspapers I depended on the trash baskets of the near-by subway station, spent money only on the Daily Worker—no comrade threw that away, his instructions were to leave it on the subway seat in the hope that
some bored passenger might pick it up.
Since the subway cost a nickel I stopped riding it. I walked about sixty blocks each way to the few party unit meetings I forced myself to attend. Those units were called branches now. My branch met in a fencing studio around Twenty-third Street and the comrades were mostly professional people, men and women in their late twenties and early thirties. I didn’t know them and they knew me only by my party name which was Douglass. I was content to leave it that way and they didn’t make much effort to know me better, either. I sat through those meetings without participating in their earnest discussions about changing the fate of the world which, as far as their own role was concerned, usually revolved around the question whether to sell the Daily Worker on one specified corner in preference to another. Little had changed in party routine in those ten years since my first attendance at a party meeting in New York; assignments were as seriously debated and as little carried out as then. The main difference that I saw was that these comrades were arguing dialectics with a choicer vocabulary and with less of an accent.
The last party meeting I was ever to attend happened to fall on the day the afternoon papers headlined the outbreak of an army revolt in Madrid, and reported that Negrin and other government and party leaders had fled Spain in their private planes. I was brooding over those developments, distressed over the fate of those faithful in the ranks who had no private planes in which to escape, when the voice of the literature chairman brought me sharply to my senses. He was holding aloft a party pamphlet just issued, written by Joe North, former Daily Worker correspondent in Spain, former editor of the New Masses, then the Daily Worker’s special expert on Spain.
“It is a most important pamphlet,” the chairman intoned, “everybody should buy as many as he or she can afford, it explains the party line on Spain. This pamphlet refutes the lies of the Fascist provocateurs, it proves why the Loyalist Army will continue to fight on for years until victory is assured. It must be distributed in quantity to reach the greatest masses of people.”
The comrades each dutifully bought several of them. I picked up a copy and leafed through it. Incredible as this may seem it bore the title “Why Loyalist Spain Will Win!” or some such words. Joe North did not hog all the credit for that brilliant dialectical forecast of history. He modestly acknowledged that his analysis had merely confirmed the correctness of the party line and the previous reports made by those other two eminent researchers and objective scholars, Robert Minor and John Gates.
I lifted my eyes and saw that the noses of all comrades were buried in the pamphlet. Then the silence was broken by a comrade on my left commenting with loud satisfaction: “This pamphlet sure came just in time. Now we’ll know how to answer the lies of the Fascist Hearst and the other capitalist newspapers.” His words were greeted with spontaneous applause. I got to my feet and walked out without giving them a further glance; what the hell was I doing there among those political cretins?
Other incidents of similar idiocy followed in quick succession, making it more and more difficult to put off resolving the issue. Like the time I attended a new Theater League performance somewhere around Fiftieth Street off Broadway.
It was an anti-Nazi play by Bertolt Brecht, the famous German revolutionary playwright. It was the tragedy of an honest, upright German Reich justice who had retained his position on the bench even under the Nazis, although deep in his heart he was still devoted to the principles of true justice as they existed in Germany before Hitler. The play opened with the justice and his wife fearfully discussing their horrible suspicion that their own beloved only son, a loutish boy of 14 who belonged to the Hitler Youth, might be capable of denouncing his own father as being disloyal in thought to the Nazis. True enough, exactly that was to happen to him. Few eyes remained dry at the conclusion of the play as that German judge was led away by brutal stormtroopers wearing swastika armbands while their son, that monster product of Nazi training, proudly declaimed from the stage that no true Fascist must ever hesitate to denounce his own father and mother if they were disloyal, if only in thought, to the Nazi Reich.
There was tremendous applause and many curtain calls. The party comrades were cashing in on the play by loudly hawking their literature when one of the leaders of that theatrical group turned to me with pride: what did I think of the performance, wasn’t Bertolt Brecht a genius? I praised the performance and told her how it moved me; as to Brecht, he was obviously a man of great talent but in this instance, unquestionably also a dishonest plagiarist. Those were lighting words. I was immediately challenged to prove that and in no time became the center of a large crowd, mostly hostile. I asserted that the play was based almost verbatim but without acknowledgment on a Soviet news report. Hostility now gave way to perplexity and I was asked to elucidate.
I related how, early in 1935, following the assassination of party leader Kirow in Leningrad when the first big Soviet purge began, the Party had called on the Young Pioneers to ferret out the hidden counterrevolutionary sentiments of their parents and report it to the G.P.U. We at the Uj Elore once published a report on one such trial sent to us by the official Soviet News Agency which gave details of the exemplary Communist behavior of a young boy of 14, a leading member of the
Young Pioneers, whose suspicion became alerted when he saw his father abruptly stop talking to his mother the minute he entered the room.
This incorruptible product of Soviet upbringing had not only denounced his father to the G.P.U. but also blazingly repudiated his father’s cowardly denial of the charge. He denounced him in open court as a barefaced liar, demanded that his father pay with his life for his traitorous sentiments, and called upon all Young Pioneers to overlook all sentiment and follow his example. In conclusion that news report proudly noted that this outstanding Young Pioneer leader was the first one to applaud in court when he heard his father pronounced guilty and sentenced to death.
When I finished my tale the group around me hastily dissolved except for a few innocents who stayed on to argue that I really couldn’t be serious in maintaining that there was any analogy at all between those two cases? Couldn’t I see that the theme of this play was the bestial corruption of youth under Hitler? Wasn’t it also clearly evident that the story I quoted was about the trial of a bourgeois counterrevolutionary traitor in the pay of the imperialists? No, the only thing evident to me was that I had overstayed my welcome and I left in the glare of hostile eyes.
Then came signs.
Within a period of two days three letters came to me unexpectedly from France. One was from Alexander Cseresznyes, the other from that German commissar, the third from a Spanish youth leader formerly on my staff in the Brigade. They were from different concentration camps in France, but containing the same heart-wringing tale of misery and ill-treatment to which those remnants of the defeated Loyalists who crossed into France were being subjected. They were sleeping in the open in midwinter without blankets, clad only in their filthy summer rags. Those concentration camps were but bare ground surrounded by barbed wire, without even wells or latrines, and only the cold winter sky for roof. They were forced to sleep rolling in their own excrement in holes scratched out of the ground with their bare fingers, drinking the human-sewage-infected water that accumulated in the shallow, handscooped holes in the ground. Besides being starved they also suffered from their Senegalese guards who sadistically enjoyed using their whips on them. They were begging me for help, to organize for them food, money, used clothing, cigarettes, anything. In closing they affirmed anew their loyalty to the Communist Party and emphasized that what they desired above all was political asylum in some country willing to receive them.
I took those letters up to the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade demanding that we act at once. “Yes, it is too sad, we know all about it, but there is nothing the Friends can do right now, collections are slow in coming in, we need all the funds to run the office and to take care of the wounded and needy veterans here.”
I lost my temper and demanded an emergency meeting, what those comrades wanted most was a chance to leave France. Pasionária was not suffering in those camps. She had been transported with other Communist leaders by boat and special plane to the Soviet Union to be feted there as the last-ditch fighter of Fascism, even though her son, the offspring of this fiery speaker who passionately demanded that every last Spaniard fight to the death, had sat out the Spanish Civil War in Moscow where his mother had prudently sent him for safety.
I drew up a resolution on the spot and thumbtacked it on the wall :
BE IT RESOLVED: that the Friends and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade petition the Soviet Union to offer asylum to all the exiled victims of Franco now languishing in the French concentration camps.
Be It Further Resolved: that copies of this resolution be sent not only to the Daily Worker but also to all capitalist newspapers and wire services, for widest dissemination.
By that time there was quite a commotion, my resolution was hastily removed from the wall, and I was upbraided by the paid office staff. Didn’t I know what I was doing? How could the Friends and Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade be asked to sign such a petition, how could I possibly ask the Soviet Union to admit those people? Wasn’t I aware who those people actually were? Did I know how many actual spies, saboteurs, counter-revolutionists, imperialist and Fascist agents and spies were among those “so-called veterans”? Why, most were international wreckers trying to worm their way into the Soviet Union.
“You bastards really believe that? Believe that those comrades in arms of ours, who gathered from all corners of the world at the call of the Comintern, who risked their lives over and over in the fight against Fascism, are really Fascist agents?”
I must have become overemotional for they started to soothe me. “Now, now, take it easy comrade, we know how you feel. Do you think we enjoy thinking of those comrades suffering in those French concentration camps? We are working very hard to get them admitted to Mexico. . . .”
I stalked out telling them to cross my name off their list, pronto!
The signs came more rapidly now. Upon his return from Moscow Gil Green, National Secretary of the Young Communist League, commented admiringly on the loud, prolonged applause and standing ovation afforded to the party leaders in the Soviet Union. He contrasted it scathingly with the informal, almost indolent attitude with which the membership received its leaders here and demanded a change. His orders were that in the future the Party and Y.C.L. leaders were to be greeted by the same loud cheers and standing ovation whenever they entered a meeting hall.
The focus became sharper:
FRANCO! FRANCO! FRANCO! SIEG HEIL! HEIL GIL GREEN, BROWDER, STALIN!
Arise ye prisoners of starvation;
Goosestep ye wretched of the earth!
Damnation shall be your salvation;
Soviets to bring the new rebirth!Next Stalin spoke and Molotov echoed him.
“The Soviet Union does not consider any imagined or real ideological differences a barrier to establishing friendly and cordial relationship with any other nation.”
“Fascism is a matter of taste.”
I needed no further signs. My recovery was complete. Cured by the hair of the same dog . . .
American Commissar 