The Communist Party Convention

...As we missed the first name of a speaker, the classical scholar at my side asked me whether I had heard it...

...But the death rattle of an impotent party was discernible...

...I understood that to mean, "You never saw a man fold so fast...

...Only echoes from the floor could reach an adjoining press room while we heard every incantation with scarcely any strain...

...Let's not lose our heads, comrades," said one lady who went on to plead that when the party makes a turn, it should move neither to the left nor to the right— which would leave only the stratosphere above or, better, interment in the ground below...

...Many of them—not those who glibly made speeches at the Chateau Gardens for any of the factions—must be sitting in their rooms, staring at the wall and asking themselves, "What have I done...

...Wouldn't a traitor have raised the spectre of Hungary, and wasn't he thunderously silent about it...

...Ostentatiously, the new National Committee of the party contains a large minority of Negroes...

...Yet his supporters could feel the balance tipping in his favor on this matter, too...

...Not, I am glad to say, in DISSENT...

...It was...

...It was more than a little depressing...

...The leaders conspired to divert at tention not only from Hungary but also from the USSR...

...instead there was a huge torch with two hands grasping it, under a screaming caption that read "Unity...

...But first a little self-examination, a little remorse, a little shame...

...Absolution was available to all who would simultaneously accept the party's total independence and its complete submission to outside control...

...The CP is straining toward a higher synthesis in its program for the de-collectivization of American agriculture, against "the food trust," while it supports the collectivization of agriculture everywhere else...

...Is that too harsh...

...Busy being Dennisized...

...And Comrade Bill Foster, beloved, enfeebled, hale and hearty, wandering about the hall like a ghost of old crimes, added the last word, "In Hungary, the military action taken...

...I was scared— and felt rather shabby about being scared...

...I could not help being a little appalled, as I sat there, by the significance attached to these terminological disputes in certain sophisticated liberal and socialist circles...

...Here was a legal political party in which, thanks to Senator Humphrey (that sterling ADA leader) and his Congressional associates, membership is illegal...

...Another observer, who knew the inner workings better than I did, explained to me that this man was one of those rebellious Gatesites who, as such, needed to use even more jargon than usual (that would come to about 150 per cent) in order not to automatically be classified as an outcast...

...Many American Communists were shaken by the recent revelations of Soviet despotism and by the murder of the Hungarian revolution...

...There we sat, the War-Resisters and I (not to mention Stringfellow Barr and two brave representatives from the American Civil Liberties Union) at a special table beside a sort of Intourist guide who smilingly obliged us with his constant presence...

...No hammer and sickle graced the wall...

...Will the Gatesites discover that totalitarianism is a monster...

...No doubt they admire Tito and Gomulka more than Khrushchev, and regard the Russian dictatorship as a "workers' state" Primus inter pares...

...The Chateau Gardens appeared to be an incongruous place for Communists to gather till one learned that the building was formerly a Russian Orthodox church...

...Eugene Dennis, who is said by some hagiographers to occupy a middle ground between the two puerile extremes, explained in his keynote speech that "imperialist designs in Hungary" had been thwarted...

...Be cause shouting distance would be just enough to ruin everything...

...Yet the slim margin by which "interpret" was finally accepted is being widely construed as a victory for the dissidents...

...Nothing more substantive was ever at issue throughout the convention...

...Yet Gates was right: he was exactly the party patriot he claimed to be...

...If they ever do, it is not likely to be from under cover of an organization com mitted to one or another brand of totalitarianism...

...All right...

...Serious damage could be done to the magnificent Negro movement in the South if the Communists managed to twist their way into it—an objective which would please the White Citizen's Councils even more than Ben Davis, Jr...

...I put it to you that, outside Moscow and CP headquarters, the scale doesn't exist that can measure the grain of difference between these two phrases...

...Jacques Duclos, whose written words on liquidationist revisionism proved so effective in defeating Gates' plan for transforming the party into a "political action association," also told the convention in his historic letter that "the criminals and assassins of the socialist revolution" in Hungary (that is, nine million Hungarians) had to be put down, as they were...

...How to put things, how to "formulate" slogans—that is, how to find a new Aesopian vocabulary to hide the rotten content of Communism was the real problem...

...The better part of two days was devoted to whether a resolution should put the party on record as one that "interprets" or "creatively applies" the principles of Marxism-Leninism...

...All of them agreed that their number one task was to reduce the party's isolation in this country...

...He and not Tito or Gomulka or Togliatti or John Gates, should be the model for the shaken and troubled Communists...

...Most of them have quietly departed from their old haunts...

...Won't the FamilySized Farmer (breathlessly waiting the latest word from the Chateau Gardens), the Negro people (who seem lately to have been doing well enough without any help from Foster or Gates), the workers, the women and the youth, understand us better if we don't use such terms...

...If the FBI mistook us for delegates, why, we surely reciprocated in kind...

...How can you tell the difference even with a scorecard...

...Two unnamed delegates did try to raise this question: they were quickly squelched as being out of order...

...The new Communist goal is an "anti-monopoly coalition" that will serve "the workers, the Negro people, and other democratic strata...

...Busy being Fosterized...

...We all deplored the CP's policy—this one no more than the rest—but, since everybody else was barred, our being there had some value...

...John Steuben, an old party leader who really broke, recently said from his sick-bed, `I want to live the rest of my life in agony and silence...

...But if a child has two heads and four legs, after a while you decide he's a monster...

...Early in the convention, after Gates had stated his reasons for opposing himself ("I subordinate my views to the interests of party unity") he was congratulated for his fighting speech, and the Rebel thereupon exclaimed, "You aint seen nothin...

...Yes, indeed...

...We are Marxist-Leninists" (the abridged form of an old label that used to include Uncle Guess who...

...only that the drop in membership—those who vote with their feet—is far more important and encouraging than anything John Gates says in public or whispers in the ear of some credulous fellow-traveller...

...11 The New Yorker cartoon in which a Communist addresses his fellows as "Comrades and members of the FBI" kept running through my mind...

...To be sure, Joseph Clark, Alan Max, John Gates and the men around them would probably like to be free of the more crude forms of dictation from Moscow...

...Comrade," he mused, "Same root as camera...

...Not that they need forever live in silence...

...If I shuddered that Saturday morning, it was not entirely due to the inclement weather...

...No," I replied, "but I think it's Comrade...

...i Someone, clearly not a press photographer, snapped my picture as I entered the Chateau Gardens on Houston Street and Second Avenue in New York's lower East Side...

...So went an impassioned speech, but the question raised by some Gatesites was: Is it necessary to keep saying so...

...Was it Sir Roger de Coverly who remarked, "There is much to be said for both sides...

...Little symbols tell most of the story...

...For long stretches of time from the ninth to the twelfth of February, I was the only anti-Communist and non-pacifist in a hall full of four hundred odd Americans...

...was imperative" to protect the country against fascism and war...

...These dirty words were flung about with cheerful ferocity by the party leaders who spoke at the convention, and every delegate recoiled from one or the other as if they were loathsome manifestations of an even deadlier disease that really did invade the premises, namely, bourgeois Philistinism...

...the convention merely "opposed," it did not forever "reject" a change in name...

...Are they really torn by basic ideological dissension or are tactical differences all that divide "left sectarianism" from "right opportunism...

...You couldn't have guessed it at the convention...

...Of course, the torch was adopted for emblematic purposes long ago by the Socialist Party to differentiate it from the Communists—but so be it...

...Well, I don't want to suggest that there are no stirrings in the CP...

...For this we can all rejoice...

...Fifty delegates were fairly fresh from prison where the courts had sent them under the Smith Act...

...The same delegate who spoke against the "adoration of cliches" studded most of his five-minute talk with nearly every cliche in the book...

...I do not believe in creating a caste of pariahs...

...This, it may be, is cause for alarm...

...Regular newspapermen and even a couple of irregular ones from Tass were excluded, and several of them reviled us for our "privileged" position...

...John Gates, one-time Commissar in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (a job that had its dirty side), and today's leader of the New Communism, yielded to no man at the convention in the warmth of his "party patriotism," a term he used to explain why he voted against his own faction in support of the party's misbegotten line...

...Is this the man who (we had heard) was supposed to be leading a break out of the totalitarian night and into the daylight of democratic politics...

...Many pointed out that the differences were merely semantic, a view to which, after four interminable days of dreary jargon, I was rapidly persuaded...

...At no time was the word "capitalist" used above a murmur, and not more than a few times in that low key...

...Where were the Gatesites...

...Wouldn't someone deficient in "party patriotism" have asked why Russian troops shot down the workers of Budapest...

...The party's request for space had been turned down by more than sixty proprietors of other New York meeting places, thereby demonstrating that in this city principle counts for more than a fast buck...

...One of these delegates, I was told, could count on about six more weeks of party membership...

...The party, after all, would remain the party...

...Means roommate—or cellmate in this case...

...No five or more genuinely radical organizations in the United States today could have put on such a show of strength...

...He also noted cogently that The Daily Worker's stand, neither condemning nor condoning the Soviet occupation of Hungary (more accurately condemning the first phase and condoning the second) was "an incorrect unity formulation...

...One delegate attributed the party's errors—and Comrade Foster wished to be included among those who had committed their share—to "objective conditions...

...The last term apparently encompasses youth, women and Family-Sized Farmers (as they are quaintly designated in the language of what a party satirist calls Life-Itself-Manship...

...I was part of this group, one among several who feared that the same inference would be made about us that Secretary Dulles had I52 made but a few days before about American correspondents in Red China...

...When Gatesites argued for a given course and Foster's Old Guard for another, it was a fraternal discussion...

...but these are no longer Communists...

...Of these cleansing responses almost nothing could be heard at the Chateau Gardens...

...And with all that a convention comprising almost 300 delegates and 125 friendly visitors from 35 states, was somehow assembled...

...I commend to them the public utterance of a writer finally restored to sanity, I. F. Stone, who when told at a symposium the other day that Soviet Russia, with all its faults, was still a child of the revolution, answered: "Child of the revolution...

...Great stress was laid upon latching onto, or infiltrating, the movement of the Negro people to smash Jim Crow...

...My personal impression of the much-advertised CP faction fight, in which a rigidly Stalinist group led by William Z. Foster was supposed to be battling a "liberal" Communist faction led by John Gates with canny Khrushchevy Eugene Dennis maneuvering in the middle, may be summed up as: "There's nothing to be said for either side...

...Uniformed and un-uniformed cops swarmed all over the place...

...Ninety-five members, outside the leadership, are at present under indictment...

...For I had walked into a tawdry caterer's establishment to observe the sixteenth national convention of the American Communist Party...

...All right...

...But surely the new and sophisticated leaders of the Negro Resistance will know better than to allow the Communists to come within shouting distance...

...How was it possible...

...Ostensibly, the party headquarters is to be moved to Chicago in order to get into closer touch with the Negroes...

...But I do not wish to exaggerate: there was one matter of importance taken up at the CP convention...

...Readers of the New York Times probably know that this convention began its sessions not with The Internationale, an obsolete anthem, but with The Star Spangled Banner...

...More pointedly: "Bad luck to both of them, whether they continue to close ranks or not...

...A. J. Muste, Norman Thomas and Roger Baldwin had negotiated for a group of outsiders to attend the first such event in six years...