Cause at Heart
Scales, Junius
Anyone curious about the attraction of Communism for many decent, idealistic Americans in the 1930s and 1940s would profit from reading Junius Scales's new autobiography, Cause at Heart: A Former...
...Horrified as he was by the Nazi-Soviet Pact, Scales accepted Logan's justification of it as an opportunity for the USSR to buy time...
...Later, when he was serving in the Party underground, Scales would have doubts, not about the bizarre policy but only "of my adequacy for the job I had taken on...
...Scales was once again convicted by a North Carolina jury, a decision upheld by a 5-4 vote of the Supreme Court...
...He was soon a prominent figure both in student politics and, surreptitiously, the State Communist brain trust...
...They'd stand us against the wall...
...Sent to Chapel Hill to explain the Pact to the local comrades, he forgot his earlier reservations and basked in the glow of "leadership...
...e also is clear about the Party's shortcomings...
...What did I, a product of the big bourgeoisie/landed aristocracy, a half-baked intellectual, know about politics...
...he was angered by the ouster of Earl Browder as Party leader in 1945 but was eventually persuaded of the correctness of the decision...
...CAUSE AT HEART: A FORMER COMMUNIST REMEMBERS Junius Scales/University of Georgia Press/$24.95 Harvey Klehr 42 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 Scales falters when he describes the reaction in 1947 of his fellow members of the North Carolina chapter of the Southern Conference for Human Welfare, a New Deal inspired group often accused of being a Communist front, to his revelation that he had been for some time a secret member of the Party...
...Scales quickly fell in with a group of radical students and teachers and was deeply influenced by them...
...Party members built a strong labor union among Winston-Salem tobacco workers, yet their ideal, the Soviet Union, "had converted unions into managerial tools to facilitate the control and exploitation of workers...
...So too was the experience of meeting "real Communists," working people, both black and white...
...In a final gesture, the Communist Party, to which he had dedicated his life, obstructed fundraising efforts for his defense now that he had broken with it...
...As leader of the Party in Chapel Hill, he manipulated members to get the results he wanted...
...Not the least of the harm they did was to buttress the beliefs of young people like Scales...
...It took Scales some twenty years to understand the Party he had joined...
...His conviction was reversed but Scales was retried, even though he was no longer a Communist...
...Working for a year as a textile organizer in High Point confirmed Scales's belief that the Party protected the interests of working people...
...Moreover, he was disturbed by the need to conceal his affiliation with the Party...
...in effect he was advising them to hide their conviction that Communists did have all the answers...
...Convinced that the "dream hadbecome a cruel, convoluted hoax," he resigned from the Party early in 1957 with "enough failures to provide me with grief and guilt for decades to come...
...At the time it fortified his sense of importance and rectitude...
...Even while counseling his comrades to practice tact, Scales realized that he was asking them to be deceptive...
...As always," he notes about the time he orchestrated the expulsion of two Party members, "the glorious end justified the slimy means and I had to squelch that persistent inner voice which suggested that perhaps the unsavory means was tainting the quality of the socialist goal...
...Scales's contribution is also valuable because he is one of the few Southern Communists who have been able to explain honestly and without cant how Southern repression and segregation, Harvey Klehr is the Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of Politics at Emory University and the author of The Heyday of American Communism (Basic Books...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR JULY 1987 43...
...Visiting Communist firemen like Clifford Odets and Anna Louise Strong offered young students like Scales a sense that their faith was not misplaced...
...The United States government was unimpressed...
...Scales was the first Communist convicted, under the membership clause of the Smith Act, for being a member of an organization that had conspired to teach and advocate the overthrow of the government by force and violence...
...The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill was a mecca for such a bright, sensitive student...
...A fervent supporter of the Republic, delighted that the Soviet Union was providing it with aid, and convinced that "fascism meant the dominance of the know-nothing, bigoted hateful brutality that I knew locally," he was exactly the sort of student the campus Communists were anxious to enlist during the heyday of the Popular Front...
...Born in 1920 into a socially and politically prominent Greensboro family that traced its heritage to the settlement of Jamestown in the 1600s, he grew up in a 36-room mansion, filled with servants...
...That same realization, of course, lies at the heart of the fierce hostility and contempt with which American Communists were regarded by their countrymen...
...There was certainly little in Junius Scales's background to make one suspect that he would become the most prominent Communist leader in North Carolina...
...Logan's dedication, courage, and humility were inspiring...
...He found interesting intellectual companions, settings in which ideas were taken seriously, and people who judged others on the quality of their ideas and behavior, not on race...
...in retrospect, he admits, it increased, the Party's isolation...
...when combined with liberal timidity, produced Communists...
...Intellectually precocious, repelled by the acquisitive impulses, bigotry, and philistinism of fellow-students, Scales was lonely and unhappy, even attempting suicide just prior to his freshman year at college...
...Scales looks at his past "with some indulgence, some pity and certainly with some guilt and amazement...
...He served 15 months in prison before President Kennedy commuted his sentence...
...Within a few months Scales was ready to quit...
...The Party screamed about civil rights but conducted its own internal heresy hunts for "white chauvinists" and probed its members' sex lives...
...Had he followed his impulse, Scales would have been like many, if not most, of the people who joined the CPUSA in the 1930s, briefly remained members, and then departed...
...Yet, the liberals who had vehemently denied conservative charges of Communist infiltration of their organization certainly had cause to be angry with Scales, who had, after all, been dishonest about his true loyalties...
...I had never known a Negro, except as a servant," he notes, and yet at integrated conferences he was sitting next to Negroes and talking to them...
...Scales notes that one of the powerful attractions of the Party was "the feeling of being one of the elect, of self-denial in behalf of a great cause, of self-sacrifice for the good of mankind, the heady sense of being in the right with a mere handful of others...
...While out on appeal, he became disillusioned with the Communist movement following Nikita Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's crimes...
...the idealistic and the oppressed, as well as the fanatical and dogmatic...
...Scales had been suspicious of the Party but finally concluded that if he wanted to stand with the poor and oppressed he should join...
...He quite properly ridicules the weak government case that either he or the Communist Party had been preparing to use force and violence, noting that "the simple truth revealed quite enough wrong with the Party"----its rigidadherence to the Soviet Union, a policy that "was mostly poisonous and tended to adulterate such constructive activities" as building unions and supporting civil rights...
...Scales served in the Army during World War II...
...attendance at a Communist training school in New York provided the indoctrination that turned him into a cadre, committed to the cause and mindful of how difficult it was to be a good Communist...
...With bruising honesty he notes that even the good work done by Communists—on behalf of labor and civil liberties—was tainted...
...He was not prepared for the anger, "the hatred and fear of Communism, even in so liberal an organization...
...Several faculty tried to recruit him in early 1939...
...Moreover, one textile union's newspaper, controlled by the Party, always "would contain some item about the lot of workers in the Soviet Union or the Soviet role in maintaining world peace, items which were barefaced (though unintentional) lies...
...Amidst the dozens of apologias and rationalizations that have appeared about the Communist experience in America, it joins a few others that manage to explain the attraction of Communism while recognizing its destructive results...
...That kind of idealism and arrogance did not prevent Communists like Scales from abjectly altering their positions when the Party line changed...
...Scales offers a wonderfully nuanced look at the kinds of people who were attracted to Communism in the South...
...Although financial reverses eventually drove his parents down into the middle class, Scales lived a very protected and sheltered early life...
...The shift in policy did not induce questioning about the Party, but about himself...
...D efore Scales could act on his impulse, however, he met and worked for a summer with Bart Logan, the Party's District Organizer for the Carolinas...
...Party members had an arrogance that often repelled other people...
...Active in the faction seeking to reform the Communist Party, Scales soon came to realize that if the opposing group "had state power in their hands, they would kill us...
...For several years in the early 1950s Scales went "underground," separated from his family for long stretches, living under aliases, and traveling surreptitiously throughout the South to maintain contact with Party units functioning in a semi-clandestine manner...
...Anyone curious about the attraction of Communism for many decent, idealistic Americans in the 1930s and 1940s would profit from reading Junius Scales's new autobiography, Cause at Heart: A Former Communist Remembers...
...He did not enter public school until he was 12, an idealistic and gentle boy who had little contact with his peers...
...He emphasizes that the Party's role as one of the only organizations where blacks and whites worked together was a powerful factor in the loyalties of many of its members...
...His days at UNC coincided with the Spanish Civil War...
...the Chapel Hill Communists were inefficient, talked in cliches, and were hateful to their political opponents...
...Several years ago, a biography of Anna Louise Strong claimedthat the lies she told on behalf of the Soviet Union had done little harm...
...The sheltered, sensitive young college student had discovered poverty and misery firsthand and believed he was working with the only group willing to do something about both...
...he could always leave if it did not meet his expectations...
Vol. 20 • July 1987 • No. 7
