LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY

...He pointed to me and said: "You'll transfer to Brooklyn next year...

...Willy listened gloweringly...

...Others had reacted differently to the pact and had made it the immediate cause of their disenchantment...

...For better or worse, I did not go that way...

...If I gave way now, could I ever think for myself and still remain a Communist...

...I n 1950, I began to write for The Reporter magazine, founded in that year by the late Max Ascoli...

...The 313 only article of this entire period that I can reread without wincing appeared in the New Masses of July 9, 1940...

...The line between one and the other was sometimes so thin that one behaved in the NSL the way a good Communist was supposed to behave...

...I could not or would not change my mind, and I made no secret of my heterodox view...

...It was a "mass organization," as the Communists liked to call it, or a "Communist front," as anti-Communists preferred to put it...

...319...

...He was considered to be the Comintern's representative from 1922 to 1925 and behaved as the eminence grise of the American party...

...I finally decided that someone else would have to take on the task of filling in the missing years...

...At this point, a deus ex machina appeared to save me...

...His tone changed as he said: "You were right about it...

...After its flirtation with the Browder heresy, it seemed to have become inoculated against any unorthodox ideas...

...Army in 1943, I was saved from thinking any more about American Communism, at least for the next three years...

...I happened to have come of age politically in the first half of the 1930s, a circumstance that perhaps explains why I was so deeply interested in its roots in the previous decade and why I was willing to spend some years trying to understand it...

...I think it was Bell who persuaded Rossiter that it was pointless for two people to be working on the same subject at that time and suggested that I should be brought into the group...

...it had a beginning, a middle, and an end...

...He can't do this to me...

...Lissner replied testily in another letter that I had "ignored" various theories about the Russian Revolution and that he did not accept Kennan's "uncritical appeal to his own authority...

...Willy did have a brother, but he was a specialist in Hungarian folklore and had never left Hungary...

...I read the book with more than ordinary interest and had known some of the characters in it, though not the way Chambers had known them...

...Ostensibly it was over a matter of political judgment about an immediate situation...

...The old issues were raised anew, but now in a different light...

...I could not resist telling it to some friends, one of whom was by chance a friend of Chambers...

...I thought there was, and the party line said there was not...

...Indeed, a new generation of younger scholars or would-be scholars had made the subject something of a lively academic growth industry...

...if that is what it took to protect the Soviet Union from a Nazi attack, so be it—an agonizing move in an agonizing world...

...they were the years of the Popular Front during which discipline was more relaxed and the political line more tolerant—within well-understood limits...

...Yet the "break" had not been simple and easy...

...This book was never published...

...As France was falling, I received an urgent request to interpret its significance...

...When I was inducted into the U.S...

...Most of its leaders were members of the Young Communist League, but I was not...

...Yet such were the times and my own deepest inclinations that I decided to take the job on the Daily Worker...

...A "front" organization, such as the NSL, prepared many of its members for taking the next step into the Communist movement...

...No one seemed to have heard about him for years...

...Then I had an inspiration that had worked for me in the past...

...This organizational distance did not seriously hinder me...

...my entire life was sure to change drastically if I accepted his proposal...

...The second half of the 1930s took an unexpected and yet explicable turn for me...

...I was now free to devote myself wholly to the book on which I had been working without as yet being able to see the beginning of the end...

...It was useless for me to explain in advance what had happened and why...

...Earning a living still came first, writing a book was a luxury at my own expense...

...I had had no sympathy for the England of Chamberlain or the France of Daladier...

...His book, The Heyday of American Communism: The Depression Decade, appeared in 1984...

...Yet that story was a very special one, very far from my own experience or that of anyone I had known...

...The curse of "McCarthyism" was then at its most virulent...

...It was not to be autobiographical at all, because my own experiences had in any case been too limited and specialized...

...Rossiter, an Eisenhower Republican, did not make the slightest concession to this incitement...

...q This is taken from the preface to American Communism and Soviet Russia...

...I tried to hint that the Soviet Union was apt to be next by arguing that the Nazis were driven to move in "an ever widening circle of expansion for easy booty" and that the French defeat was only "a phase in a complex and continuous struggle...

...My initiation came in the National Student League, which I joined in 1930 as it was being formed during my first year at the College of the City of New York, better known as City College or CCNY...

...Air Force and unnamed important foundations as evidence of my heresy...

...One day, as I was looking up someone else in a book of the 1920s, American Labor Who's Who, edited by Solon De Leon, my eyes fell on a totally unexpected entry...

...I took some temporary jobs to earn a living...

...I looked in the New York telephone book...

...After the German invasion of Soviet Russia in June 1941, an emissary came to see me and said in effect: "You were right...

...I was young enough at the age of thirty to start all over again and to look back at the experience of the previous twelve years as an inestimable, if costly, lesson...

...Unfortunately, it was dinner time, and I began to receive frantic signals to get rid of our guest or risk losing dinner...

...It turned out that Chambers had made a mistake...

...All the while a full crisis of conscience was upon me...

...yet I transferred to what was then the Brooklyn branch of City College...

...It seemed to me that a serious, scholarly study of the Communist Party as it operated above ground and in ordinary circumstances with ordinary people was more necessary than ever in order to understand its program, policies, and members...

...It was the first time that any article of mine had been rejected...

...He offered to pay my expenses for several months—I think the sum was $1,000...

...It was the Fund for the Republic, which had been set up in 1952 as an autonomous organization by the Ford Foundation...

...a revolutionary, therefore, had to be close to it...

...my life and mood had changed too much...

...From the outset, I wanted to do something that may have seemed to be quixotic or far-fetched at the time...

...I rewrote the book the first time to make it show why the war had broken out, not why it was going to break out...

...At this, Willy seemed to take as much interest in me as I was taking in him...

...Right-wing demagogues did not even bother to attack it any more...

...The article was delivered just before the deadline and must have gone in without much editorial deliberation...

...The pact had sent the Nazis westward...

...One of Rossiter's group was Professor Daniel Bell, then at Columbia University, who knew of my own project...

...I preferred being a "fellow-traveler," which was how I came to be around it...

...The year ran out without result, and I spent the next five years working on Castro's Cuba instead of on American Communism...

...The NSL was my first school of politics and the Student Review my first school of journalism...

...I did not go the way of Trotsky, but he was not altogether wrong...

...the roots are more deeply and secretively revealing than the trees...

...Just then my world came apart with the fall of France in May-June 1940, though it took me two more years to see that I was never going to put it together again...

...Now, however, a different issue had emerged...

...In later years, I tried twice to return to what was darkly referred to as "Volume Three," but I could never manage it to my satisfaction...

...Was there or was there not a "new moment in Europe...

...I was willing to believe that they had been negotiating with the Soviet Union in bad faith...

...Underground Soviet "couriers" might be recruited in the party but they did not work in the party...

...I confidently answered: "Yes...

...One was to go to Cornell, another to Wisconsin, and so on...

...Rossiter agreed to give me two more years to finish the original plan...

...I did nothing about it, beyond hoping that someone would somehow turn up to make good my malfeasance...

...No more than two or three books of any consequence had as yet been devoted to it...

...At one meeting, the Communist party's mentor in the NSL, an older assistant professor of economics at Columbia University, deplored this uneven state of affairs and announced that a decision had been made to distribute the City College members...

...I was suddenly faced with the kind of personal political crisis that so many had confronted before and were to confront afterwards...

...its fate was bound up with my own in the Communist movement...

...I did not realize what was in store for me when he asked those who lived in Brooklyn to raise their hands...

...There's nothing you can do with it now...

...I could tell myself that the Soviets had been forced to protect themselves by making a pact with the Nazi devil as the Western powers had done at Munich not too long before...

...I asked dozens of people who might have known him for any scrap of information...

...Nevertheless, I was unwilling to give up a measure of freedom or absence of discipline, such as I could enjoy as a fellow-traveler...

...I wish it could be said that I had saved Whittaker Chambers a million dollars, but I doubt whether Willy had a case that could have brought him a million or a thousand cents...

...I came back home in November 1939, two months after the outbreak of the war...

...I was drawn to the formative period because it became clear to me, as I studied the 1930s, that the old-timers who still dominated the party in every way had been molded politically in the previous decade and were responding to a doctrinal discipline that had been instilled in them in the past...

...I came into a huge studio—paintings all around, someone posing in the distance for one of Willy's illustrations...

...He quickly brought me to a far corner, where we spoke in whispers...

...I was after all starting on what I hoped might be an academic career, though academic jobs were then in very short supply...

...Draper has done his work and presented his findings with scholarly detachment and restraint," and he called for judging the book "as historical scholarship not just an item in current political controversy...

...Yet, somehow, without intending it, I had produced a book on the formative period of the formative period...

...The pact, as I saw it then, had lost its raison d'etre...

...American Communism and Soviet Russia, which at least covered the entire formative period, appeared in 1960...

...As I look back at it now, this reasoning was at best a rationale for what may temporarily have been good for the Soviet Union, not for what was good in the long run for both the Soviet Union and the rest of the world threatened by a rampant fascism—but even my constricted perspective was enough to get me into deep trouble...

...In my first year in graduate school at Columbia University in 1934-35, I happened to find myself at some social gathering standing next to the foreign editor of the Daily Worker, the official Communist organ...

...Chambers called to ask if he could borrow my copy...

...It had been long out of print...

...Almost half a column was devoted to none other than Willy Pogany...

...I suppose that formative periods have a special appeal for historians...

...Much had been published that was little more than anti-Communist propaganda...

...I later learned that Joseph's name had not been Pogany at all...

...no other was likely to come forth for some time, perhaps for some years...

...There was Willy Pogany, listed living not far away from 315 me in Manhattan...

...Much, though not all, of my own story is that of part of a generation...

...After he had calmed down, I gently enquired what he thought of the manuscript as it stood...

...The editors entitled it "New Moment in Europe," some evidence that they understood something of what I was trying to say...

...Klehr was not the only young scholar who in the 1970s had been taking an interest in American Communism...

...One of my favorite characters had come to be a Hungarian Communist who was known in Moscow as Joseph Pogany and in the United States in the early 1920s as John Pepper...

...I had never met Chambers and had known nothing about him other than what he told about himself in his book...

...the first half was distinctly different from the second half, though some writers on the 1930s came of age politically in the second half and have given it undue emphasis as if it were typical of the entire decade...

...The incident is worth recalling to recapture something of the still charged political atmosphere in which the first volume appeared...

...I received a call from him a few days later...

...My reaction to it took the form of a long article, published in two parts, in the New York Review of Books of May 9 and 30, 1985...

...In any case, the reference to Willy as Joseph's brother was no longer without reason or malicious...

...317 This surprise attack from an unexpected quarter brought a letter of protest from George F. Kennan, whom I then did not know personally...

...It had been a job of historical excavation, because I had known nothing about it and some of the most important figures in it had been wiped out of the party's historical memory...

...A much more vicious campaign against me was launched by the Hearst press and elsewhere, without making any visible impression on the Fund for the Republic or me...

...I immediately picked up the phone, called the number, and heard a richly Hungarian voice on the other end...

...I chose dinner, regretfully, and missed my one chance to have a good talk with Chambers...

...My status as a fellow-traveler may even have helped me, because it could serve to show that one did not have to be a card-carrying Communist to hold a leading position in the NSL...

...It is, moreover, a mistake to think of the Communism of the 1930s as if it were a monolith...

...He gathered together a group of scholars and assigned them to write on various aspects of American Communism...

...An editor of the New Masses called me in and warned that "that was the way Trotsky and all the renegades had gone...

...It was favorably reviewed, especially by Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., in the New York Times Book Review of March 10—the first "systematic effort to weave all aspects—doctrinal, organizational, personal—in a coherent critical narrative . . . careful and exhaustive job . . . indispensable foundation for any understanding of American communism...

...One sentence leaped out of the page at me—that a well-known artist and illustrator, Willy Pogany, was supposedly the legendary Joseph's brother...

...I left the New Masses early in 1939 to go to Europe to write a book on the coming war...

...Lissner referred to some mysterious research by the U.S...

...I accepted his offer and promptly left for Paris again...

...I worked and worked—and to my horror again produced the "wrong" book...

...The sentence does not appear in Chambers's book, for good reason...

...I had been able to go along with the Nazi-Soviet pact of August 1939, because I interpreted it in terms of ruthless Soviet Realpolitik...

...again he must have shuddered, again he protested, and again agreed that it should be published...

...I still recall one such action with particular pain...

...Copyright ® 1960, 1986, by Theodore Draper and reprinted with the permission of Vintage Books, a division of Random House Inc...

...some time afterwards I began to think of writing a history of American Communism...

...it is then that one must decide whether to follow the party line wherever it may lead and at whatever personal cost...

...I was tired of working on the New Masses anyway...

...Now you can come back...

...Unfortunately, Rossiter had by now run out of funds...

...The first crisis of conscience in the Communist movement is always the most difficult...

...By the same line of reasoning, however, I came to believe that the pact had outlived its usefulness as a result of the French collapse...

...As I have reread it after all these years, I have felt that I would not do it differently if I had to do it over again...

...Virtually my entire experience in the Communist movement was thus journalistic rather than organizational...

...Willy was obviously a man who could be trusted...

...IT WAS TOO GOOD A STORY TO KEEP TO MYSELF...

...It seemed to be a fitting epilogue to the present work, though most of the argument is about the 1930s rather than the 1920s...

...The lesson, I told myself, was to think for myself and never again get caught in the coils of a party line...

...My second article was never published...

...I later learned that his lawyer had presented the page on Willy in American Labor Who's Who to the judge and that it had helped to convince him to dismiss the case...

...Of all the Communist parties in the West it remained most subservient to the cult of the Soviet Union...

...With France crushed and Britain almost mortally wounded, what was going to be Nazi Germany's next move and what bearing did it have on the status of the Nazi-Soviet pact...

...It hinted that there was something sinister about my references to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, which was hardly my subject...

...I was 312 stunned...

...Three years later, it undertook to sponsor a large-scale study of American Communism under the direction of the late Professor Clinton Rossiter of Cornell University...

...Willy at that stage of his life was long past his prime, and his loss of a million dollars in commissions must have been wishful thinking...

...He has cost me a million dollars...

...After listening to some of my stories, he asked me point-blank whether I believed that war was coming...

...I sometimes wondered whether Willy was a real Pogany, but I never did any more research on him...

...Again the circumstance was somewhat fortuitous...

...It was not a full-time job...

...it had apparently been Schwarcz...

...I asked for some time to think it over...

...Suddenly, I was startled to come across a reference to Joseph Pogany and his alleged brother...

...As I was plodding along, because I was working slowly and fitfully in my spare time, Whittaker Chambers's book, Witness, came out...

...He straightway told the story to Chambers, who quickly tried to get a copy of the book...

...Once having made that decision, the next crises, which almost always coincide 314 with changes of line, are more and more easily overcome...

...I was active in and around the Communist movement in the 1930s...

...But I couldn't...

...He was Professor Harvey Klehr of Emory University, who had written a book on the "cadre" of the American Communist movement that had impressed me...

...I was more fortunate...

...I had made my first trip to Europe in 1938 for the New Masses, spending most of the time in Paris during the crisis of its Popular Front, in Czechoslovakia during its crisis preceding the "Munich Agreement" between Hitler and Chamberlain, and in Spain towards the end of its civil war...

...it was a book, I knew, if the wrong one...

...This has also seemed a good a time as any to answer questions which I have sometimes been asked: What was my own personal connection with the Communist movement...

...it was far more difficult and costly for them...

...they were few in number and hardly represented the typical Communist such as I had known...

...The reason for this cross-grained decision was that I had had about two years to think things over...

...I was around it before I was in it...

...By 1933, when I graduated, the NSL at the then recently upgraded Brooklyn College was so large and influential that it could virtually close down the school on May Day...

...Too much research can ruin the best of stories...

...I am suing him...

...Unfortunately, it was the wrong book...

...Yet I hoped that those experiences might give me a sense of how the party functioned that rank outsiders might lack...

...Some time in the 1970s, someone did...

...I have no intention of trying to relive an experience now almost a half century away, but some of the main circumstances may still hold some interest...

...With everyone stunned by the French debacle, and no party line on it immediately established, my article had squeaked through...

...Never again was I able to join a party or even a group of any kind...

...I was faced with a problem...

...That endeared him to me...

...In any case, I met with Rossiter and Shannon...

...Kennan objected that the news story "gives the impression Draper has challenged respectable interpretations of the Russian Revolution and that this was in some way connected with his former connections with the Communist movement...

...The real issue for me was whether to change my mind or at least stifle what I believed...

...He came for it early one evening, expressed his gratitude and asked whether he could do anything for me in return...

...there was nothing else to do...

...This bare sketch of those years may help explain something about my need or motivation years later to write the two volumes of American Communist history...

...He was delighted...

...Two years later, I finished a book, but not the book...

...UNFORTUNATELY, I WAS NO MATCH FOR WILLY...

...Willy won me over completely as he looked me straight in the eyes and said with a sincerity that clearly came from the heart: "I am an artist...

...I had come to see that I could get into the same trouble again if ever I disagreed strongly enough with the party line...

...I immediately realized that Chambers had had some reason to associate Willy with Joseph, though Chambers had assumed too much or had vaguely recalled the similarity of their names...

...It was probably a way of settling accounts with my own past, now far enough away to be less disturbing, but also a reaction to the kind of treatment which had been given to the subject...

...Again I sent it to Rossiter without an explanation...

...I was enough of a true believer to be convinced that, whatever its faults or shortcomings, only the Communist movement was capable of making the "Revolution...

...Dutifully I raised my hand...

...he had adopted Pogany during his revolutionary career in Hungary and the name was something like the Hungarian equivalent of Smith or Cohen...

...Unfortunately, the newlyformed NSL was top-heavy at City College and weak or nonexistent elsewhere...

...I n subsequent years, I was busy with other things and paid little attention to the vagaries of American Communism, which had shrunk to a small, minor sect...

...I telephoned him and simply announced that I had finished a book...

...He told me to come right down to see him...

...By chance, however, our paths once crossed as a result of my research and his book...

...I did not think it prudent to tell him the whole story on the phone...

...My friends of that period went through their own final crises of conscience a decade and a half later...

...1923 was too far from 1945 to make up a plausible alibi...

...I refused to write any more articles after 1940, but to avoid a total break I wrote some book reviews in 1941 and two or three in 1942, after which I cut myself off completely...

...But a strangely hostile news article, filling all of one column, signed by Will Lissner, appeared in the New York Times the very next day...

...I could not expect anyone else to know what the significance of 1923 was and why it had become my stopping-point...

...This is not the place to go into all the circumstances of those years—the very bottom of the great depression, the overhanging sense of preNew Deal social and political breakdown, the predicament of poor, intellectual, Jewish boys, and all the rest, often described by now...

...Peculiarly, it had the effect of reinforcing my original plan...

...The NSL was not an official party organization...

...The Soviet press let it be known that nothing had changed, there were no new problems or new conditions, no "new moment in Europe...

...with the Nazis triumphant in the West, it was now purposeless...

...the earlier in my view explains much 318 about the later one, especially why the latter turned out the way it did...

...I was glad to spend the hour or so that it took for the trip from Brooklyn, where I lived, to the uptown campus...

...It began: The French breakdown has transformed the balance of forces which existed in Europe and in the world at the outbreak of the war last September...

...Therefore, we now face new problems and new conditions...

...The Nazi-Soviet pact was said to be still in full force and ruled out any change in policy...

...It was Willy...

...It may appear strange in retrospect, but the issue as it presented itself to me then was not the pact itself...

...It was the only way I could defend it from a still pro-Soviet point of view...

...316 Meanwhile, I was not making as much progress on my history as I would have liked...

...Klehr's book, and his well-known association with me, which he clearly explained in his preface, brought new attention to my own previous work...

...But this time the party line caught up with me as a result of word from Moscow...

...I stayed there as assistant foreign editor for two years, and then spent two more years as foreign editor of the New Masses, the Communist intellectual weekly...

...Rossiter gave me two years to do the whole job...

...I found Willy in a well-known residence for artists at Central Park West and 72nd Street...

...I agreed to wait a year before giving up...

...I merely said that I wanted to talk to him about his brother...

...Yet I seemed to block the way, because I had amassed much of the documentary material necessary to do the job...

...The history was entrusted to Professor David A. Shannon, then of the University of Wisconsin, who had written a well-known work on the history of American Socialism...

...Only if Rossiter could be made to read the entire manuscript without prejudice was he likely to accept it as an accomplished fact...

...It was to be a "traditional" history, such as one might write about any other political party or movement, based on as much documentary material as possible and satisfying normal scholarly standards as far as I could manage...

...I began to look for people who might have known him in his American incarnation—not an easy task a quarter of a century later...

...My course was more convoluted and took somewhat longer...

...I wrote and rewrote it three times in the next three years...

...Though I had never met him before, to my astonishment he told me that he was looking for an assistant editor and that I could have the job...

...How to find Willy...

...I pleaded guilty...

...Still, my failure to finish the task that I had taken on rankled...

...It was my luck that the Fund for the Republic and Rossiter's project desperately needed to show some signs of life...

...In any case, I served as editor of the Student Review, the NSL's official organ, a role that I could not have played without' the approval of the Communists higher up in the organization...

...I could not hope to match Chambers's sensational story, but I might produce something of greater historical interest as the political mood of the 1950s receded and faded away...

...I was asked to write another article on the same subject for the following issue and attempted to say the same thing in even stronger form...

...I explained to him what I was doing, how I had read about his brother Joseph in Chambers's article, and why I wanted to know more about him...

...Let's publish it...

...Willy was a type-cast Hungarian as well as the seemingly typical artist of long ago...

...Willy claimed that he had lost a million dollars in commissions as a result of Chambers's mistaken identification of him as the brother of the infamous Comintern agent, Joseph Pogany...

...In Kennan's opinion, "Mr...

...Thus The Roots of American Communism appeared in 1957...

...This time I managed to get to 1929, another turning-point in the story...

...The goal was still 1945...

...I woke up one day to realize that I had written a book which ended in 1923, a turningpoint in the story...

...it was amicably agreed that I would write the history from the origins to 1945, as I had intended, and that Shannon would take on the post-war, postBrowder story after 1945...

...He then proposed that I should go back to Europe and write a book on why war was inevitable...

...No significantly new material has been found...

...I was still writing from time to time for the New Masses from the outside whenever the editors thought that I had something useful to contribute...

...But don't do it again...

...Freed from other cares and diversions, I now really dug into the period that had come to interest me the most—the formative period...

...Strangely perhaps, it came for me after the Soviet Union had been attacked and the wartime Soviet-American honeymoon had begun...

...My book was the first to be finished...

...It clearly indicated that he had once been interested in left-wing causes and politics, both in England and in the United States, instead of, or as well as, money...

...I was inordinately proud and happy to have been admitted to City College, the only institution to which I could possibly have gone...

...I cannot any longer be proud of the article as a whole, but what got me into trouble was where it was right, not wrong...

...It turned up in, of all places, the Saturday Evening Post, which was serializing Chambers's book before its appearance...

...I was still determined to write an altogether different kind of work on the American Communist movement, one far more recognizable by the hundreds of thousands of people who have passed through it and far more relevant to their everyday activities...

...After watching the development of the new school for some time, I decided that I could no longer ignore it...

...When I returned, the editor of a new fellow-traveling publishing house, Modern Age Publishers, asked me to go to lunch...

...I care only about money, not politics...

...I had no trouble believing that Chambers was telling a true story to the best of his ability...

...I had made my documentary material available to him but otherwise had nothing to do with the way he went about his work...

...If I had known that, I would never have called Willy in the first place...

...Yet Chambers's book continued to serve a negative purpose...

...When I had finished, he burst out to this effect: "Oh, that terrible man Chambers...

...Yet the line between the two decades is not a hard and fast one...

...It was one of the saddest days of my life...

...I hoped and intended to go on, if only the Fund could continue to support me financially...

...I had lost the momentum of the first two volumes...

...Did it have any bearing on this book...

...You bastard," he shouted, "you've deceived me...

...no attempt has been made by anyone else to go over the same ground...