How Communists Are Made
HOW COMMMUNISTS ARE MADE THE funeral of Mr. Steve Katovis, who was shot by a policeman during a strike which threatened to do considerable property damage, was the occasion for the greatest...
...And yet this funeral, bringing together a sizable throng of young people eager to sing the Internationale, came as something of a fascinating surprise...
...New York had, of course, known that radical sentiment was piling up, that public disapproval of the Sacco-Vanzetti trial had reached impressive proportions, and that diverse acts of repression had aided the spread of revolutionary propaganda among groups which poverty and helplessness have soured...
...The Communist need make no distinctions, allow no exceptions...
...And yet they have forced the public to notice their "demonstrations," have preached the doctrine of revolution in hundreds of factory and mining towns, and have got themselves into an indefinite number of station houses, courts and jails...
...In one significant essential, however, things grew steadily worse...
...The answer may well be that here is the ultimate expression of resentment...
...This conduct, so characteristic of the "success morality" which has invaded every nook and cranny of American life, is in glaring contrast with the action of Mr...
...The proof of this has been the circumstance that virtually all Socialistic activity in the United States has grown out of the wish to reform political abuses...
...There was no compelling reason for doing so...
...Some of this youth is very young, indeed...
...And while one might well marvel at the vigor with which industry had kept on going despite the terrific blow of last fall, it was evident that many a little wheel was not turning, that parts of the great machine had been laid up for repairs, and that just such a crowd as this young Communist throng might well appeal to the desperate...
...Nevertheless the warnings given by history are worthy of attention...
...Significant enough is the fact that a volume of American Communist poems in translation has obtained a wide circulation among European radicals...
...But the rigid militant action of the Marxists was born out of the despair of the old world, and it cannot thrive here unless there are either enough of those who have starved abroad to keep the movement alive or unless we reproduce the situation which almost automatically bred opportunity for such men as Lenin...
...They were merely indignant at anybody else's being out of a job...
...The short cut to the spread of Communism in America lies through such conduct as was condemned in Flint...
...It lends enormous support to their critique of authority, to their belief in the "right to happiness...
...But we should most assuredly go the way of Russia if this trust were violated or misused...
...It means that brains and real energy are being employed in the service of Bolshevism...
...Normal veneration of authority was undermined by a sequence of conscienceless and incompetent generals, love of order was submerged under the collapse of virtue in high places and behind imposing facades...
...Five thousand Communists...
...A considerable body of literature has been printed for distribution among adherents...
...The trial of the officers of this institution resulted in prison sentences totaling 240 years, and in the discovery that more than $2,000,000 of the bank's money had disappeared...
...And yet, over a period of several years, they had used the bank's funds for speculative purposes, had concealed their activities behind a smoke-screen of forgeries and misleading ledger entries, and had squandered the savings of their clients...
...And it may be worth asserting that the social future of the country is less a matter of combat between extreme revolutionists and conservatives than between men of the Mott stamp and men like those whom the Flint court sent to jail...
...Now if Communism is to develop in the United States, much fostering of what is at present a tender little plant must be done in the great cities...
...What is it then that makes the idea so attractive...
...They had only one excuse: the market looked good, and if "things had panned out" nobody would have been the wiser...
...Set up primarily as a substitute for the Boy Scouts and the Y.M.C.A., it enlists boys and girls whose parents either believe in revolution or are unaware of the purposes of the Pioneers...
...but there is nobody who hopes to get on without the great industrialists...
...The spectator realized that growing unemployment was in the background-a wholesale failure to get work which was bringing to relief agencies and rectories a stream of applicants for aid...
...No doubt a definite streak of insanity acts as something of a prophylactic, but one must not make the error of underestimating its attractiveness for those who live in an atmosphere of constant complaint against social circumstance...
...The thing has never been indigenous to our soil, on which the frontier conception of equality was nurtured for years and passed on to children as their birthright...
...We do not believe there is any immediate reason to take alarm...
...Thus the era preceding the coming of Bolshevism was, on the whole, a time of increasing social betterment in Russia...
...His disgust with things as they are now extends to the American Federation of Labor as well as to Wall Street, to the endowed university no less than to the church...
...Should any large section of that humanity follow them, the event might well prove serious...
...It may well be-we think it probably is-a little out of date...
...Tabula rasa is the formula in which he sees relief from every woe held to oppress him or his group...
...People will endure hardship, they will quench their anger, so long as they have faith and hope...
...Mott might have shrugged his shoulders and allowed the disaster to run its course...
...Indeed, the share taken by them in civic and religious work made them distinctly representative of the better type of community leader...
...The national wealth increased, markets and means of communication improved, and the nucleus of a program of reform was adopted by the government...
...Mott covered the amount with his own private fortune and insured the stability of the institution...
...Somebody, they will say, must be entrusted with the conduct of industry, and while the work is efficiently and honestly done they will not complain...
...All the guilty men enjoyed the confidence of their fellow-citizens...
...Russian "leaders" proved themselves venal and inefficient with a gusto almost incredible in retrospect...
...Leadership aware of its social obligations, even intrinsically unselfish, has time and time again banked heavily upon the support of public good-will...
...Our cities harbor European memories, and in some of them con-ditions are bad, indeed...
...And so it is instructive to note that the same newspapers which carried accounts of the Katovis demonstration were also spilling over with information regarding the collapse of the Flint, Michigan, Union Industrial Bank...
...The justification of the American system has been its practical effectiveness...
...After all, the Katovis demonstration is interesting chiefly as a sample of what America might be like if, in the contest incessantly staged between them, men of the Mott stamp conceded the victory to the forgerers of Flint, or more generally to the kind of fatally understandable but none the less fatal morality which they so dishonestly espoused...
...So vast is this confidence that citizens even neglect, as something of secondary value, the proper development of their political institutions...
...This breathes hatred of the rich, of Christians, of government...
...Seldom in history has industrial society gone so far as ours in placing its reliance upon a group which the current phrase terms "captains...
...Curiously enough the majority of those who gathered to wave insurgent banners round the coffin of Katovis were not starving or out of a job...
...And since young people are averse to tedious qualifications, as well as energetic in the service of any ideology they sponsor, Communism interests young people...
...They were crusading not for themselves but for humanity...
...Aware of the losses which had reached a staggering total, Mr...
...Its songs exude rabid blasphemies...
...Chicago is a remarkable example of how everybody expects to live in spite of politics...
...But here was revealed the kind of leader, of dominant American citizen, which has been the pride and the hope of the United States...
...Charles S. Mott, chairman of the bank's directors...
...America is content that they should own an overwhelming proportion of available resources and means of distribution, provided only that the total social result be expressed as "the best that can be done...
...But our national life would be altered sharply and startlingly if it ever proved desirable to reform industrial mismanagement and felony...
...No aspect of American Communist activity has received more attention than the organization known as the "Young Pioneers...
...A band of young hotheads, it will seem, stuffed to the forelock with stale and fantastic theories...
...Steve Katovis, who was shot by a policeman during a strike which threatened to do considerable property damage, was the occasion for the greatest Communist demonstration of recent years...
Vol. 11 • February 1930 • No. 16
