Out of the Communist Past
Charney, George
The following sketches are taken from A Long Journey,* a memoir that attempts to sum up a lifetime of experience in the American Communist party. The locale of these sketches is New England in the...
...During the strike Wilgus and I spoke on the town common in Rutland...
...I could hardly recognize him...
...He lived now in a hovel on the edge of town...
...Perhaps he hoped in the turmoil and confusion to achieve the recognition he hungered for...
...I went to Lawrence that night...
...It was a small obit, hidden away among the sad fragments that face the editorial page...
...He hungered for recognition...
...At the time I was organizational secretary of the New England district...
...Our world...
...In a voice that was barely audible he described the meeting at which he had been expelled, as evidence of the Party's "iron discipline...
...He appeared before audiences in Boston, in meetings organized to support the strike...
...He was a popular speaker at college meetings in Vermont and New Hampshire...
...people...
...He confided in me that he was the first mayor to levy a tax on the big factory in town that had always enjoyed immunity...
...We received invitations to speak all over New England, at forums, meetings, churches...
...As the United Front movement made progress and modified our harsh classagainstclass posture, Phil too, albeit grudgingly, broadened his outlook and switched from his proletarian stogies to a 10c Perfecto...
...We viewed the Party as a tiny but heroic vanguard, surrounded by enemies...
...Later Phil joined the army but became part of the tattered, ignominious band that lived out the war in rep'l-dep'l camps...
...but this was stretching a point...
...We had a long talk, and I had no doubt that he had a genuine and lively interest in Marxism...
...In the course of time he became restless, discontented, abrasive...
...And now the new program, enunciated symbolized the transition or leap from the in bold American terms by Earl Browder, old line of the Party to the new...
...And he had talent for leadership...
...The Party was his life and now he went to jail as an outcast from the only life he had known...
...Over 8,000 people attended...
...His mill went on strike in 1936...
...helped to unleash the creative energies of The Dimitrov report to the World Con-the Party...
...He probably would have found it as difficult to espouse these views to his wife as it had been to acknowledge his conversion to Leninism...
...These qualities appealed to me...
...Boston, the small Yankee outpost of the Party, had come into its own...
...One day I received a message that he wanted to see me...
...He had a way, in common with the made-in-Russia cadre, of placing the emphasis on the last syllable, Par-tee, to invest it with greater unction and to give grace to those who had enlisted in its cause...
...We had caught up with * A Long Journey will be published by Quadrangle Books of Chicago this fall...
...primary tie was still ideology, the main outEverything seemed right...
...He didn't mind...
...Phil had imagination but very often came up with erratic ideas that would cause consternation...
...That the CIO had muscle there was no doubt...
...The membership, especially of my generation...
...Poor Phil had rotten luck—I suspect that he was too cocky, that he had lived too closely within the Party where his authority was unquestioned, to blend with the men and seek a modest place in the ranks...
...Jack began to live in bohemian style, holed up in a shack at Lake Bomoseen, and came to meetings irregularly...
...Phil, too, was a Smith Act victim, and in the shortest mockery of a trial on record he was sentenced to a long prison term in Atlan'a...
...It may be that he viewed it as an expression of gratitude...
...The one event featured in the obit was the testimony he had given against me in the Federal court...
...I learned that in the intervening period he had become a confirmed alcoholic, had landed among the derelicts of the Bowery, and was later rescued by AA...
...At the time, I was asked by the comrades in Barre to attend the meeting and represent the district...
...What did matter was that he brought the Party out of its doldrums and fired it to a pitch of enthusiasm, not by eloquence as much as by his dynamic participation with the people in every activity...
...It was readily accepted...
...I served as organization secretary, his closest co-worker...
...I still remember the agony of that night when he took out all his belongings: his papers, his pistol, his Party card, which he gave to me...
...The prospects were bleak...
...I went to visit Phil on his return from prison...
...He advanced the view that Truman represented a real fascist menace and that the Party was wrong in directing its main fire against Eisenhower and the GOP...
...the word spread and helped to set a new style of manners in the Party...
...For years he had aspired to national leadership but instead was shuttled from district to district like a rep'l-dep'l functionary...
...I was introduced to our Yankee friend on one of his visits to the bookshop...
...I never asked...
...I issued the Party card and never really knew why he joined...
...He had a habit at meetings of pounding the table when least expected, to summarize the debate— and this long before Khrushchev—as though he had artfully studied the mannerisms of the "iron-willed Bolshevik" A colleague once said of our relationship that we complemented each other...
...In 1962 I chanced to read the notice of his death in the New York Times...
...We had no appreciation of its favorable impact on the people here at home...
...the emphasis on look, internationalist...
...At this point we offered what little moral and financial help we could muster...
...He had to be helped from the stand...
...I lost track of him in the years that followed...
...We were dubbed the "revisionists...
...but the local members were angry and would not abide his erratic behavior...
...He collapsed with laughter, as he described the utter bewilderment of the factory management...
...Jack Stachel, the chief Party spokesman on trade union matters, at a national conference described the CIO as the "TUUL with muscle...
...He was of medium height, powerfully built, like a county sheriff or a commissar in the movies, with flashing black eyes that expressed a lively intelligence as well as an unruly temper...
...In the latter years, as the state chairman of the CP in New York, I was actively embroiled with John Gates and others in the internal struggle to reform the Party...
...soft-voiced, with an aristocratic bearing...
...It was not difficult for us to assume that if one of wealthy background joined the Party, he was, of course, "one of the best sons...
...It was at this junction that Phil, from his post in Baltimore, ventured to attack the policies of the Party...
...The Party had been quickly and harshly reconstituted under Foster...
...The revelations and the events that followed in Poland and Hungary led to the exodus of thousands from the Party...
...Phil was expelled soon after...
...It was one of the last textile strikes of the period...
...Once Browder was seen helping his wife put on her coat in a restaurant...
...He was brutally assaulted by inmates and subjected to harsh treatment by the prison authorities...
...Our efforts to reach him on union matters in these troubled times were unavailing...
...hence we were unprepared for the surge of interest evoked by the events of the time...
...He came to Boston, a picaresque figure, smoking Pittsburgh stogies that gave off a horrible stench and using a rough and ready lingo, mixed with the Party jargon to convey the image of a proletarian leader...
...I was arrested with the "second string" in New York...
...gress on the United and Peoples' Front in-though it would be rash to say that we were stantly captured the imagination of the party Americans first and Communists second...
...He was a new member, of a wealthy Vermont family, and soon after was assigned to lead the Communist party in that state...
...The action seemed harsh and puritanical...
...That, combined with his tremendous energy, inspired the Party to activity unprecedented for staid old Boston...
...It was an incredible position that outdid Foster...
...He was a tall, gangly, red-necked Yankee and asked questions about Marxism, and naturally we were suspicious...
...He thoroughly enjoyed his dual role as mayor and anti-mayor, attending august sessions of the Federal Reserve Bank and chuckling over its inevitable downfall in the barn...
...In that period we were wary of anyone who showed an interest in the movement other than college radicals or Jewish garment workers...
...trary, was dynamic and brilliant, born to Yesterday we had been a small, isolated leadership...
...Back in Boston we viewed it as an important event, for he was one of the first native-born Americans in the textile union to join the Party...
...He took me to the attic and told me that he had taken to armed robbery on the road and did not want to compromise the Party...
...I was a GI stationed at Fort Lewis, near Olympia, Washington...
...I rang the bell and he opened the door...
...A lovely banquet was held...
...that it resembled the TUUL was again stretching a point...
...Thus the spirit of unity and national identification was instilled in the Party ranks and spread in all directions to influence even the mores and customs of the Party...
...Phil was also prepared to take on the toughest assignment in the Party, such as Pittsburgh, where most District Organizers had battered their heads against those anthracite walls...
...In 1935, riding the circuit of the New England towns, the world had belonged to the Utopians—to us...
...These beliefs, that held fast despite the repressions of the Cold War, could not survive the impact of the revelations of the 20th Party Congress and the role of Stalin...
...In previous years our public meetings were modest affairs of a few hundred or so in Roxbury or Dorchester, where we had a small base in the Jewish community...
...In the course of the strike he joined the Party...
...He was penniless and virtually alone...
...The decisive event in reshaping and building the Party was the rise of the CIO under John L. Lewis...
...Our joy was short-lived...
...Browder took issue with Phil, gently but firmly...
...He came out of jail with his sight seriously impaired...
...The Party was "underground" and only a few of us, temporarily free on bail, conducted the restricted public activities of the Party...
...The Seventh World Congress of the Comintern had already taken place, with Dinmitrov's famous appeal of 1935 for the United and Peoples' Front against Fascism...
...but most of us won the respect of our fellow GI's...
...The national leaders were imprisoned under the Smith Act and hundreds of state and local leaders were picked up throughout the country...
...The world had changed...
...His experience was pitiful...
...OUT OF THE COMMUNIST PAST In this period Phil, too, had changed...
...We embraced in the hallway...
...True, he was hard, but he was also compassionate and the first to take responsibility for error...
...He was a delightful character, with a droll sense of humor...
...It more than made up for his rough spots...
...Some of the old-timers warned that he was a "toughie," but we welcomed him...
...Seventeen years later he appeared as a surprise witness against me in my second Smith Act trial...
...He hoped that the Pittsburgh stogies and his tough manner would alter his image...
...I felt a quiver of emotion and a sadness for his wasted life, for his wasted dreams and mine...
...His term in Atlanta was a ghastly experience...
...The Highwayman H H E WAS A TEXTILE WORKER in Lawrence, in his early thirties, Irish-American, president of the union local and commander of the Legion post, and proud of his status and popularity...
...I can only hope that he found in Roosevelt and the New Deal at least some of the egalitarian values he cherished...
...Some of us, it is true, who were known as Communists were subjected to harsh and discriminatory treatment...
...We became Jeffersonians, students of We adjusted overnight in our evaluation American history and as we rediscovered our of Roosevelt and the New Deal, though revolutionary origins, we reinterpreted them in Marxist terms...
...It was just the beginning...
...The Party was under severe and continuous attack...
...Many of the union militants left town in search of employment...
...It was just a hangover of the past, of caps and leather jackets in the popular romantic image of Lenin and his followers of 1917...
...He knew the rules, that by publishing his dissenting position, he had breached the discipline of the Party...
...I was charmed by his personality, and he was delighted to meet one of the officials of the Party...
...His last post was district organizer of Maryland...
...Phil was ebullient as ever, blustery, full of piss and vinegar...
...Nevertheless we had unity in the battle against fascism, the in-a new awareness of our American roots and spiration to achieve the broadest alliances we were readily convinced that the two were on all issues that affected the lives of the not only compatible, but inseparable...
...Like Abraham, father of the Jews, who, according to some historians, came of a wealthy Babylonian merchant family—though to others the Bible presents him as a humble sheepherder...
...He was shrunken, his face was disfigured and had a greenish pallor...
...These faults, or shortcomings as we called them, mattered little at the time...
...His under the pressure of the "masses," or some arrival was fortuitous...
...and if GEORGE CHARNEY his ideas did not inspire praise, they did compel attention...
...His first question was, "How is the Par-tee...
...Browder had been ousted from leadership and expelled...
...In 1952 the situation was desperate, morale was low...
...IT WAS AT THIS POINT that Phil came to Boston to guide the activities of the Party...
...The two opposite personalities sect...
...He lived in a dingy flat uptown...
...Americana, though compelled to garnish it OUT OF THE COMMUNIST PAST with our own ideas...
...He suffered torment in his desperate effort to prove that he was still a loyal Communist...
...I don't know how much of this nonsense he really believed...
...These faults were in part due to his nature, but in greater part to his being so much a product of the Party and its peculiar mores...
...A man's status in the Party was often determined by "composition" or class origin...
...Wilgus was a natural...
...OUT OF THE COMMUY NIST PAST When I first met Wilgus, he was in his late twenties...
...The Mayor of B .. . H H E WAS A FREQUENT VISITOR at the Party bookshop on Essex Street, in Boston...
...Rumors came to us in Boston that he was engaged in illicit activities...
...Phil would knock them down and I would pick them up and dust them off...
...He rebuffed us and voiced the antiCommunist slogans of the American Legion and the right-wing leaders of the textile union...
...but he still smoked it like a stogie, furiously...
...It was even rumored that 1905'ers in Chicago followed the fortunes of the White Sox with consuming passion and were known to miss meetings to listen to a game on the radio...
...He was the district or-but was compelled to modify his policies ganizer of the Communist party...
...That was all...
...And he was even more the victim of a system in which the demands of "discipline" overrode all other considerations, including that of elementary humanity...
...Following the outbreak of the war, I met him in the winter of 1942 in Seattle, Washington...
...In the Presidential year of 1936, Phil reached for the stars and we hired the Boston Arena with Earl Browder as the featured speaker...
...He also confided, ruefully, that he was obliged to read his Marxist literature surreptitiously, in the barn, because of the violent antipathies of his wife, who derived from a prominent Republican family in the state...
...These meetings, I learned, served as a convenient pretext for him to come and browse among the classics of Marxism in the bookshop...
...He could not rest in the rear echelons making policy...
...He could hardly speak, and I not at all...
...I acceded and gave the decision my approval...
...The militant strikers were blacklisted, a common custom in New England in those years, and gradually dispersed...
...The Cold War had replaced the period of unity and the Grand Alliance...
...The industry was moving South, leaving ghost towns throughout New England...
...Phil, on the con-ois democracy and fascism...
...Where we had been prone to meeting of the Seventh World Congress of damn all institutions in American life, we the Comintern and the emergence of a new were now reassured that patriotism was not Party line...
...His predecessor in leadership was necessarily the "last refuge of scoundrels," plodding and introspective, one of the Ye-that there was a difference between bourgeshiva brand of Marxists...
...The Party was held in the grip of ultra-leftist policies that deepened its isolation and increased the frustration of the leadership...
...At a national meeting Phil once delivered a fiery speech studded with half-baked adventurous ideas...
...It was after the upheaval that followed the 20th Party Congress...
...We were American Communists...
...His wife had lost all her front teeth, the children were in rags...
...He was known to drink heavily, and the Party eventually expelled him as a drunkard and a wastrel...
...Our efforts failed, and I joined the exodus in 1958...
...Phil was sitting, alone, in the back of the room puffing on his cigar, his face slightly flushed, anticipating the polemics, and yet proud that he could command serious commentary by the General Secretary...
...He now was old and enfeebled...
...Unemployment was widespread, the union was desperately weak with little support coming from other locals...
...Jack reminded us of Marx's comment that the revolutionary movement attracts the best sons of the bourgeoisie, just as the French Revolution had won over the best sons of the feudal nobility...
...These ideas, however exaggerated or dressed up, molded the thinking of the members and spread their influence to the rippling circles around the Party...
...We even projected a flamboyant slogan—"Communism is 20thcentury Americanism"—to dramatize our new approach and to suggest the historical link between democracy and Communism...
...He was the victim of his unruly nature and of his ambitions...
...He turned out to be the mayor of a small town in New England...
...I had known him in the best days, as a man of leonine appearance, splendidly virile, who commanded life...
...The locale of these sketches is New England in the 30's...
...He was now the district organizer in the Pacific Northwest...
...So Phil, like many of us, tried to make up for a dubious class origin...
...He was the kind of young, native rebel who confirmed all our expectations of the changing American scene —that the Party was destined to emerge as the vanguard of the radical upsurge...
...The Par-fee some of the old-timers argued that FDR HIL CAME TO BOSTON in the midsum-started out as a demagogue and a reactionary mer of 1935...
...The strike was eventually lost...
...He was born to rough-and-tumble combat in the field...
...Phil made a touching speech to culminate our comradeship...
...Throughout all the years in the "movement," I and many of my friends cherished the Party as the vanguard, and the Soviet Union as the "key" to history...
...We got together on each occasion for long and friendly chats...
...It was odd but compelling to hear him utter some of the sonorities out of the Communist Manifesto, as though he were brilliantly aware that he comprised the class struggle and its ultimate denouncement within his own person...
...When his position was rejected, Phil lost all restraint and published his views at a meeting in Baltimore...
...The strike was smashed and he was blacklisted...
...I was having my lunch in the office and came upon the death notice as I glanced at the page...
...He made monthly trips to Boston to attend the meet ing of the Federal Reserve Bank...
...I SAW PHIL AGAIN long after the war...
...After a time there was hardly a tav GEORGE CHARNEY em in Lawrence where he could get a friendly welcome or a beer...
...An Obituary MET JACK WILGUS during the marble workers' strike in 1935...
...It was quite a leap from the soapbox of yesteryear to Ford Hall Forum, from brickbats to applause...
...One of Phil's first acts as DO was to move the Party headquarters from its dingy office on Washington Street, near the railroad tracks to Essex Street, in the heart of Boston...
...besides, Phil was not without humor and could in a quiet hour, when his egotism was not on view, smile ruefully at his own antics...
...In 1937 the time had come for me to leave Boston...
...It gave our forces in the unions, especially the small, isolated segments of the Trade Union Unity League (TUUL), a breathtaking opportunity to join in the massive drive to build the CIO in such industries as auto, steel, and rubber, and thereby gain citizenship in the labor movement...
...Within a year the Party doubled its membership, extended its influence in the unions and among the liberals and in the Negro community...
...He was warmly greeted in all the taverns where the workers gathered...
...It coincided with the such nonsense...
...During the following year a change took place in Jack...
...He was now the figure of death...
...I saw Phil thereafter from time to time at national meetings...
...Poor Phil probably fretted that he came from the lower middle class and worked as a postal clerk and not as a coal miner...
...Perhaps with the end of the strike, the adventure was over...
Vol. 15 • September 1968 • No. 5
