INSIDE COMMUNISM'S AMERICAN PREP SCHOOL
Dupty, William
Inside Communism's American Prep School By WILLIAM DUFTY WITH NOTHING to recommend me except an old withdrawal card from the United Auto Workers and a couple of bourgeois diplomas, I...
...She spoke up quickly...
...days like these when the Stalinist community is beset by heresy, apostasy and schism...
...The Whip...
...Daphne Hellman Is the harpist-wife of Geoffrey T. Hellman, who Just vlirlolled a profile of Ben Sonnenberg for the New Yorker...
...Mention of Marcantonio's name produced a sudden tension...
...China's Communist labor leaders have been ordered to a speciil meeting in Budapest for 10 days...
...Erald Durant, secretary of Local 713 and » pro-CIO leader, was beaten severely by a CP goon squad and several others have been mauled since the UPW's expulsion from the CIO...
...Finally, desperate for breath, he paused...
...Heard on the Left SMALL COMFORT DEPT.: Under the Falangist type of fascism the suppression of workers' rights is bad enough—but not nearly as total as under the Communist type of tyranny...
...The CP is alarmingly strong in the Canal Zone...
...And yet," he said with grim irony," the Soviet Union is called by the New York Times here a dictatorship...
...The harshest words spoken about a scientist were reserved for J. B. S. Haldane...
...Everyone turned and stared at her, as Dr...
...UGT (Socialist) and CMT (Catholic) trade union federations are functioning underground with an estimated following of 2.000.000...
...Morris rejoined that what he had said was not to be taken as a "mechanical concept" and that "their progressivism is always a factor," but held firm that in general it is among the skilled workers one finds the enemy...
...Despite the dictatorship, the CNT (Anarchist...
...none in Russia, as far as is known...
...I CAN RECALL only one previous experience which suggests a comparison with the atmosphere I found in the classes at Jefferson School...
...It happened several weeks ago at the ADA convention in Washington...
...Our defense chiefs are quite concerned over an intensive organizing campaign which Harry Bridges has undertaken in the Philippines...
...British Big Business is fighting the Labor Gox:ernment in all sorl.< of tricky ways...
...At appropriate times they would read to lis great patches of Lenin bare...
...Several other candidates there were in similar straits...
...The Registrar explained that the faculty likes to keep classes small to make for more discussion...
...And in the Soviet Union housework is not the drudgery it is here...
...He affirmed the creed that whatever advances Stalinism is moral, and whatever does not is immoral...
...In a class on Culture and the Working Class, the instructor summed it all up with a reverie about how the Soviet people are encouraged to take up careers in art and culture...
...Some years ago I accompanied a friend of mine to a parish William Dufty worked lor the United Automobile Workers Union before the war, and in 1147-41 was est the national stall of Americans for Democratic Action...
...Schiff had just negotiated sale of the Post to the ILG president...
...Actually the shoe is on the other foot...
...Jefferson's picture still turns up on the catalogue, and hangs in the school office flanked on either side by Franklin D. rtoosevelt and Paul Robeson...
...Geneticists in this country cry that there has been a purge of scientists in the Soviet Union," said instructor Bernard Freidman, a N.Y...
...house, where he was taking religious instruction at the insistence of his bride-to-be and her family...
...About half the undergraduates were under 25...
...The catalogue says anybody can attend except "kpown enemies of the working class," and the student body was much like that of any New York night school...
...But the speed and avidity with which they mastered a bookful of complicated questions and answers on church dogma determined whether they were accepted after three or four sessions, or whether they had to take instruction for the full term...
...After two days, and many arrests, the government surrendered...
...The N. Y. Herald Trib's early bird is said to have picked up 18,000 new readers...
...It's time the CIO really got busy in this strategic area...
...Geneticists here say there is no such thing as the inheritance of acquired characteristics...
...Some arc amusing, but the latest, No...
...Mr...
...Friedman said that wasn't quite correct, and added, as if it were an unpleasant fact that had to be faced, that one whole Soviet Institute had been abolished and several scientists put to work elsewhere...
...It starts May 15...
...Then he turned sternly to his inquisitor and denounced the idea that Soviet workers' standards are lower than here...
...a leading pro-democrat, reports that the CP has launched a campaign of intimidation which has made it impossible thus far to form a new union...
...Before my first class was over...
...That Saturday night, a phone call came from a newspaperman-friend of Dubinsky'a saying that a World-Telegram and Sun executive in New York had received information that Dubinsky and Mrs...
...I want to take exception to your statement that Lenin hud an unparalleled insight into women," she started to say...
...II the kept press hollers about the British and Dutch exploiters being thrown out of Chln»>-«11 right," he cheered...
...This is the kind of thing they use against us in Foley Square but let them...
...Occasionally, when "class discussions" began to get out of hand, the instructor always tried to steer them back with a quotation...
...But after a half-hour of theory, a girl asked impatiently if the class was going to be limited to a discussion of opportunist deviations among labor leaders or would it deal with "bourgeois intellectual opportunists like Arthur Schiesinper Jr...
...Or someone sent over by the Trotskyites to make trouble...
...THE INSTRUCTOR...
...In Russia they weren't fired at all," he said proudly...
...Democrats...
...My class in Social Democracy, for instance, almost came apart the first evening...
...Clark admitted the omission about "happiness" — although he didn't like the word...
...MOST OF the instructors attempted to end their classes on this rising "over the rainbow" note...
...CP theoretician, were on opposite sides of a controversy...
...It was supposed to deal with Social Democracy in Europe and the U.S...
...He proposed to deal with the fair.iliar plural devils "the Reuthers, Rieves, and Dubinskys as well as the broad camp of those who play the Social Democraticjole without being conscious Social...
...Jerome's tsuccessful) candidacy for the new Board of Trustees...
...This session was fabulous for its reliance on the old Stalinist tactic of attributing the sins of the fatherland to capitalist purlieus...
...Mr...
...There is a seminary within a seminary described as the Institute of Marxist Studies—for a systematic and continuous carefully charted two-year deal open only to students interviewed the previous December...
...I began to suspect that only bravado coercion, or the relentless workings of economic determinism, could attract anyone to the faculty in...
...The i reluctance at Jefferson to deal with anything of current import was underlined by the fate of an advertised attraction billed as The Review of the Week: "An analysis of the most significant political development in each week's news conducted by members of the staff and faculty...
...Her publicist Is Ben Sonnenberg...
...Dave Dubinsky...
...In a class on Marriage and Family Life, some of the most biting words were directed at those "progressive leaders" who have allowed themselves to become infected with "poisonous bourgeois tendencies" like male supremacy...
...Back in 1944, when Browder was their leader, and the faces of our Founding Fathers often graced the pages of the Daily Worker, they stuck Jefferson's name over the door of the nine-stdry converted office building at 16th Street and Sixth Avenue in New York City...
...But the simplest, most seductive summation of the Stalinist credo was one given at the Sunday night vesper service conducted by Dr...
...Lauterbach took the floor to oppose Mrs...
...The place grew electric...
...Haltingly and in a low voice she challenged an observation he had made about Lenin...
...During the paai year, there were five strikes in Spain...
...This may mean: (a) Lauterbach (or Jerome) has broken with the CP...
...Perhaps, as some people have suggested, she was among those students at Jefferson on a scholarship from the FBI...
...2. skilled workers are more prone to deviations than unskilled), a man who said he was a skilled machinist in a plant once organized by the UE and then "raided" by the UAW immediately took exception...
...But with that, all deference to the-man from Monticello ends...
...Selsam broke in to claim that he had said something quite different --that Lenin had had an unparelleled insight into the exploitation of women by men...
...Then again in a Sunday night lecture, Joseph Clark, who recently supplanted Joe Starobin as Foreign Editor of the Daily Worker, had given a vague statistical review of how Soviet Russia was "on its way" to outproducing the United States...
...Although the entire enterprise was threatened with financial ruin last September, the Winter Term opened on schedule January 16 with a $27,000 deficit and, as the School Director put it bravely in the second week of the term, with "as many students as we had last year which was more students than we had the year before that...
...WITH A BOW to Marxist dogma which had decreed that unskilled workers in basic industries and Negro workers are to be the mainstays in the coming struggle, the school makes its main pitch in their direction...
...Of course, a scene like that one has to be seen to be believed...
...When you figure those things in, the standard of living of American workers can't compare with that of workers in the Soviet Union...
...Joshua Logan's The Wisteria Trees is being called "Southern fried Chekhov...
...An investigation impends...
...The latest strike, in January, was on* in which Madrid's taxi-drivers, supported by their bosses, objected to a rise in gasoline costs and a cut in rations...
...For three weeks in a row—while the Japanese CP defied the Kremlin, then recanted...
...Every Soviet woman knows that if her husband leaves her tomorrow, she will still be self-sufficient economically under the protection afforded by Socialism," the instructor declaimed...
...c) the CP is a democratic, organization...
...He did not defend Marc from the scourging definition as an "opportunist capitalist politician...
...The only newspapers mentioned —and then with scorn—were "the late and unlamented PM" and the Compass...
...All I wanted to say was that I thought General Stalin had more...
...Morris promised it would...
...There always seemed to be great reluctance on the part of instructors to depart from theory, or to get anywhere near controversy...
...One of the students took up this theme like a cheerleader, and volunteered the contrast between the persecution of scientists in America (meaning one professor dismissed from the University of Oregon) and the fate of scientists who had opposed the Lysenko dogma in their own country...
...Paper's executives say it's not for sale to anybody including Mikes Cowles...
...AMONG THE MANY sessions I attended at Jefferson, certainly the most historic was the School's first session—which probably means a first for this hemisphere—in Michurinism vs...
...Throughout my classes, the most bitter references were always reserved for the renegades — those who had once been, or even now seemed to be, on the Stalinist team...
...Each of the professors I encountered carried to class his bible— sometimes a work of Marx or Lenin, sometimes both...
...IN THE EXCHANGE of impassioned testimonials that passed for "class discussion," the most striking factor was the way the students always seemed to be challenging the orthodoxy of the professors...
...high school teacher...
...THE BATTLE between the democratic and Communist forces in the United Public Workers in the Panama Canal Zone is a bloody one...
...George Morris, labor editor of the Daily Worker, admitted that the words Social Democrat were used so iften as part of "our arsenal of discussion" that we were prone to forget that it was a real threat...
...Then he concluded with a rising inflection: "But they were still allowed to work...
...a major weapon of bourgeois influence on the working class, and an opportunistic perversion of the basic principles of socialism...
...Dorothy Schifi, publisher, and Jimmy Wechsler...
...After George Morris had offered our tiny class in Social Democracy impair of axipms (1...
...Then he said: "When the capitalists start attacking us for our morality, then we know we must be doing all right...
...V. J. Jerome, wife of the...
...or (d) nothing much...
...But she had come "with a group," she said...
...gubernatorial prospects...
...On March 16...
...George Westerman...
...Total circulation increase all editions (scuttlebutt) is 26,000...
...At other times the instructor would merely hold the book in his hand and claim that his remarks were drawn direct from that august source...
...AFL President William Green, authorized by the Executive Council, has gone oil-out against, the Trade Union Courier, which fie said "classified itself as a labor newspaper [and] had engaged in unethical and misrepresentation practices in the solicitation of advertisements...
...It is this whole point of view that limits research here...
...This prompted another student to ask if the course would also deal with "opportunist capitalist politicians like Adam Clayton Powell, Joe Curran, Mike Quill and Vito Marcantonio...
...A girl in ballet slippers turned excitedly and gasped: "Mentioning Curran and Marc in the same breath...
...Morris was flustered for a minute, but merely chided the student gently for "covering a lot of ground...
...They were just given other posts...
...masses learn from life, not from books...
...I tried valiantly to find out...
...Their conversion was taken for granted...
...Bitter blame befell the "liberals," who were quickly defined as "people who belong to the ALP, and take one course at the Jefferson School in Science and Society...
...A youngster immediately upraided him for his failure to discuss the fact that in the Soviet Union it is not so much the percentages of _ production improvement that are significant, but that all this production produces "a feeling of satisfaction—and happiness that workers in capitalist lands could not possibly experience or understand...
...Schweppes, the famed table v?aier company, concentrates all its advertising in British papers and periodicals at pr.esenl in a series of prominently displayed "Schweppigrams...
...Howard Selsam...
...Other newspaper exec says H-T only picked up a total net gain of 15,000...
...To make a statement like that one has to completely forget that even skilled workers in America can't afford things like education, medical care and nursery schools which are available free of charge in the Soviet Union...
...editor of the New York Post, were closeted for several hours in a hotel room during which they had a long, leisurely chat about N.Y...
...But the average number of students in the dozen classes I attended was less than 20...
...Inside Communism's American Prep School By WILLIAM DUFTY WITH NOTHING to recommend me except an old withdrawal card from the United Auto Workers and a couple of bourgeois diplomas, I enrolled January 18 in America's one and only Stalinist Seminary for orthodox Marxism-Leninism—the Jefferson School, of Social Science...
...But on the whole it seemed an unrewarding courtship, for the Negroes are few enough and I was around for two weeks before I found a pair of workers...
...He had dwelt philosophically on Leninist morality, and how Lenin was the "first man in history to understand that you can't love people scientifically without hating some people...
...And he had a quotation from Lenin to prove it...
...14, reads: We know our patriotic part, Living and learning it by heart: But, oh, we gel so sick of sackcloth For a buckcloth...
...NEAR THE END of the same lecture, a young lady addressed a statement to the School Director, Dr...
...And so it was at Jefferson...
...Any answers on this will be appreciated by readers of the Marquis de Whip...
...In the face of all this Sovlat happiness, ha asked, of what account is a little matter like the fact that the Soviet worker has a lowar standard of living than workers hare...
...Recently, they distributed copies of Secretary of State Acheaon's letter to Senator Connally criticizing Franco's suppression of labor's rights...
...Formal Genetics...
...Former Juvenile Court Judge Stephen S. Jackson, well-known Catholic layman, has been appointed to the Senate Interstate and Foreign Commerce Committee staff to go to Hollywood and investigate '"morals" in the movie colony...
...At a recent parent-teacher meeting of the Downtown Community School, Richard E. Lauterbach and Mrs...
...I'm sure I shall never forget a single detail of it...
...as an important political and ideological force in the world today...
...These big shot progressives are out every night in the week at meetings' fighting fascism, but when they get home to the little woman, they're just as bad as any bourgeois you ever saw," was the way UOPWA stalwart Mark Tarail, the instructor, put it...
...He went on for three minutes documenting this in the hope, I suspected, that sTie would sit down...
...The North African CP is using anti-Semitic propaganda among Arabs in the area...
...In most cases the wedding date had already been set...
...while Mao waited in Moscow, and while O. John Rogge proposed to bring the Serbian heresy into the councils of the Progressive party— the review of the week was summarily cancelled...
...And when the capitalists scream about Formosa, the lilndssenty trial and Lysenko, then we know we're on the right track...
...b) Lauterbach (or Jerome) is tito-teetering...
...Selsam, the School Director...
...He observed that in his plant it was the skilled workers that had wanted to stick with the UE and it was "the stinking personalities of the unskilled labor who went for the UAW...
...There were a few middle-aged, couples, an occasional pair of oldsters, but male supremacy in numbers seemed to have bowed to dominance by a group of anxious, intense ladies in their thirties...
...They have machines in their kitchens...
...The occasion was a kind of vesper service to memorialize the 2(>th anniversary of Lenin's death...
...All of which made for an arrestingly arid exchange of memorized orthodoxies in which even an occasional resort to a paraphrase, on the part of either instructor or convert, was enough to make everyone nervous, the emotional stakes being what they were...
...Before that it was known as the Workers School...
...Or from the Hearst Journal-American...
...she said primly...
...Of course, the strike was not mentioned in the press...
...Only the girl in ballet slippers confided in a quiet aside, "If Marc had wanted to sell out, he had plenty of chances before this...
...The class on Marriage and Family Life ended on the same note, when the instructor told how irrelevant it was whether Soviet women worked or stayed at home since they had attained equality -culturally, economically and politically...
...I say that if you're interested in an academic career in this country, you don't dare conduct experiments in this direction...
...And she left with one...
Vol. 33 • April 1950 • No. 16
