Junius Scales and Richard Nickson's Cause at Heart
Clark, Joseph
CAUSE AT HEART: A FORMER COMMUNIST REMEMBERS, by Junius Irving Scales and Richard Nickson. Athens, Georgia: The University of Georgia Press, 1987. 417 pp. $24.95. This timely book deals with...
...Few care to reveal their own warts and weaknesses...
...What makes the question so painful is that many intelligent, compassionate people stayed on despite all the twists and turns of communist policy...
...The book has its faults...
...Till that moment Scales was a party hero because he had been singled out by the Department of Justice for prosecution under the membership clause of the Smith Act...
...Contrary ideas all seemed to have been drawn from poisoned wells...
...The Justice Department outdid itself by making clear that it would prosecute and imprison Scales because although he'd left the CP he still refused to become an informer for the FBI...
...But it was as recently as the sixties that Junius Irving Scales, once a leader of the Communist party (CP), served in Lewisburg penitentiary for violating the membership clause of the Smith Act...
...Scales adds it up: We young scholars were all becoming hard-shelled ideologues, believing that our ideology incorporated all the wisdom and humanism of previous ages and convinced absolutely of the essential soundness of Marxism-Leninism...
...Visits by Clifford Odets and W.H...
...But no movement of the Communists in this field approached Randolph's effectiveness...
...a vibrant cultural life was "waiting for lefty...
...Bart Logan, party chief in North Carolina and a shrewd individual, explained that the Russians were making "a desperate bid for time in which to prepare to fight...
...While growing up in a home with loving, educated parents, with entree to a world of good music, literature, art and ideas, Scales found "an aggressive philistinism" in the world around him...
...Unlikely though it seems, it was President Reagan, father of the concept of the immutable evil empire, who inaugurated negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union to lift the miasma of a threatened nuclear armageddon from the world...
...Philip Randolph, trade unionist and socialist...
...That was the year when communism in all its aspects—the communist regimes, starting with the Soviet Union, the satellites of Eastern Europe, Mao's China, which broke decisively with the Soviets, the mass communist parties such as the Italian, and the small, isolated party of this country—entered a severe crisis...
...That said, it should be added that the state of black oppression was such that many young militants might be forgiven for joining what they thought was the most consistent opponent of apartheid in this country...
...Cause at Heart is must reading for those who want to know something about the history of our times...
...One valuable contribution of this book is that it demonstrates that the major victims of McCarthyism and right-wing anticommunism were the American people and the social fabric woven by the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights...
...He describes "the feeling of being apart from others," and from that alienation came an impulse that brought him to the party...
...Randolph is vivid proof that there were noncommunist, indeed anticommunist progressives, socialists, liberals, participating in the great battles for social freedom in our time...
...for the same reasons that thousands of Chinese youth broke with the Chinese CP in Peking just a few years ago...
...His organization of the March on Washington in 1940 made President Roosevelt back down and sign an antidiscrimination ruling that Randolph dictated...
...Perhaps a touch of cultural elitism was one of the reasons he joined the party...
...They also discovered how attractive and how truly revolutionary democracy was...
...There were some very bright people among the communist folk who would scornfully deny that they ever accepted anything on faith and resented analogies made between orthodox religion and orthodox communist belief...
...It was a letter department—but what letters...
...There are the expected reasons—ranging from revulsion against the segregation and oppression of blacks (Negroes, in the language of the time) to the discovery of the working class, many in number and terribly poor, especially in the textile mills of the South...
...And so too with Randolph's fight against continuing Jim Crow in the U.S...
...Auden to Chapel Hill helped to free him from the stifling world of the philistines...
...Though our country has never been a hospitable home for communist (or socialist) movements and these never had many adherents, there's something generic about communists, anywhere and everywhere...
...I remember that the New Leader suggested that the whole letter business was a put-up job...
...There was nothing for good Communists to do but take it on faith and wait for details and explanations...
...To Scales it seems that "when it came to opposing white supremacy, there was nowhere else to turn," but to the CP...
...From the beginning, as with most party members who allowed their mental capacities and characters to be twisted by their "leaders," there were always doubts about the absurdities they accepted as gospel...
...But in a joint effort with an old friend, Richard Nickson, Scales has made a serious attempt to answer the rueful question asked by another southerner and former CP leader, Robert F. Hall: "I know why I joined the CP...
...Perhaps the most glaring is a failing of the genre of autobiography itself...
...True, the Communists had opposed the oppression of blacks...
...armed forces...
...q 510 • DISSENT...
...The man who joined the party in revulsion against cultural philistinism found himself molded into his own antithesis...
...In minutes it was clear that such a pact had indeed been signed and "the Soviet radio was playing German songs and talking of the historic friendship between the two peoples...
...Foster expressed satisfaction about the intervention of Soviet tanks and indicated that they would soon take care of "this CIA 'revolution.' " Scales burst out: "Those are working people the Red Army is shooting down...
...In both instances—here and way over there—they began to define democracy as Lincoln did, rather than Stalin's or Mao's effigy...
...People who had devoted their entire lives to the party wrote about the FALL • 1988 • 509 Books crimes of Stalin and the betrayal of thousands, millions of communists who discovered that their supreme leader was a mass murderer...
...such stuff was simply propaganda from the enemy class aimed at disrupting and confusing the revolutionary working class...
...It is noteworthy that Scales quit the Communist party of the U.S.A...
...Happily, the Smith Act and the Internal Security Act have become defunct, "derelict legislation" as Taylor puts it in his splendid foreword to the book...
...Scales argues, as many present and former CP members do, that one reason they became Communists was that there was no other movement fighting Jim Crow and the exploitation of labor...
...A staunch left-wing anticommunist throughout his life, Randolph is listed by Scales as one of the many public figures urging executive clemency to free Scales...
...The Communists turned up not only at factories and mills, but, through the American Student Union, at the university...
...It was the year of the Khrushchev revelations about Stalin...
...When, in the late summer of 1939, the radio reported that a pact had been signed between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, Scales "snorted, that's about as likely as a snowstorm in hell...
...I should add that they soon saw the folly of that comment...
...The Chinese students, just like Scales, were dismayed to discover that the Communist regimes were guilty of foul and murderous deeds...
...It's difficult for someone who has not experienced the spell of devotion to a fanatical movement to understand how much the events of 1956 shook up communists everywhere...
...After leaving the national office of the party, Scales informed his attorney, Telford Taylor, that he would be defending a former Communist...
...Why did Scales quit the party...
...He reasoned that whatever Stalin and the Soviet party had done had been considered necessary for saving the Soviet Union...
...This timely book deals with events that seem to be receding into a distant past...
...The life of Junius Scales, scion of southern slaveowning aristocracy and organizer of the Communist party in at least four states of the old Confederacy, is not an infallible guide to the understanding of the problems of communism in the nuclear age...
...I would be on a slim ration of music, literature and art for a while to come...
...One way to scrutinize it is to look in the index and pick just one name—A...
...A personal note: at that time, as an editor of the Daily Worker, I was gleefully editing a feature no communist paper had ever had before...
...The FBI, of course, was busy transforming its mandate of fighting crime into fighting "dangerous thoughts...
...I know why I quit the party...
...But that's the only mention of Randolph in the entire book...
...but I'll be damned if I know why I stayed in the party...
...But as William Morris once put it, they "burned up their doubts," and for sixteen more years Scales served the phantom revolution in which his party leaders and many of the McCarthyites believed devoutly...
...Invited to attend a meeting of the party's leaders, Scales heard William Z. Foster discuss the rebellion sweeping Hungary...
...We were becoming impervious to every opposing view...
...As with any dedicated fanatic, there would be a narrowing of focus, a delimiting of the horizon...
...Why did Scales join the CP when he was a student at the University of North Carolina...
...If I were in Budapest now, I'd be throwing Molotov cocktails at Soviet tanks...
...Positions, no matter how outrageous, were accepted on faith...
...The extraordinary thing about the Stalinist study system was that it was based on faith yet persuaded its students that they were pursuing a scientific discipline...
...Lenin had said they were riding the locomotive of history, 508 • DISSENT Books but the engine went from the heroism of fighting fascism in Spain to the disgrace of supporting the Hitler-Stalin alliance...
...Scales reveals how ideology, when congealed into dogma, displaces logical thinking as well as contact with the real world...
...The year 1956 — when he quit—tells the story...
...The argument wilts under scrutiny...
...To understand world affairs, we have to understand communism, since it will be singularly important for a long time...
...But there still had to be endless lists of books, innumerable classes and study circles, even the supreme university—the Comintern school in Moscow...
Vol. 35 • September 1988 • No. 4
