Guest Column
SINCLAIR, UPTON
GUEST COLUMN By Upton Sinclair Veteran of Civil Liberties Union Warns of Communist Infiltration Thirty years ago, there was a great strike of the longshoremen in the harbor of Los Angeles....
...Thereafter, we hired a hall every night for a week or two, and we distributed protest leaflets throughout the city...
...As their hymn sets it forth: "'Tis the final conflict...
...We were brought into court, purposely at the very last moment before closing time...
...I have heard it direct from Moscow, where they used to print my books in editions of several hundred thousand, and where now they call me a "miserable renegade" and "Wall Street lackey...
...They are all democrats now, with a small "d.' They are all followers of Jefferson and Lincoln now...
...But a new enemy has arisen, no less brutal and far more cunning and dangerous...
...And when I see a semi-barbarian dictatorship setting out to destroy these liberties and replace them with terror and torture, I become a "Redbaiter,'' and haven't the slightest fear of any of the bad names the Kremlin may choose to call me...
...The blockade of Berlin was an act of war, and the invasion of South Korea was another, and there will be many more of the same...
...Standing on private property, with the written permission of the owner, I attempted to read the Bill of Rights from the Constitution of the United States...
...Millions have shared that fate and have perished in the coal mines and gold mines of Siberia...
...These days, you may find it hard to believe, but that strike was taken as a criminal action, and 700 of the men were arrested and thrown into jails which were not built to accommodate onetenth that number...
...The result was that four of us were arrested and held in jail incommunicado for a period of twentyone hours, while my wife and friends tried frantically to find out what had happened to us...
...I am speaking of Communism...
...1 believe in civil liberties of the true, democratic sort...
...But the moment the war ended they declared cold war upon us...
...I have fought for these things for half a century, and have not changed on a single one of these fundamentals...
...Out of those meetings the Southern California branch of the American Civil Liberties Union was born, and it has worked so effectively that no such violations of elementary civil rights have taken place in Los Angeles during the past thirty years...
...I don't take this information from the capitalist press...
...For in that tormented land they do not know what the words mean—and if anyone gives the faintest hint of seeking to know, he is taken away in the small hours of the morning and never heard of again...
...but a newspaper man tipped my wife off, and she and her friends came running into the court and put up bail for us...
...I say to you: Communists are real...
...Upton Sinclair has written scores of books and novels...
...What that means to us members of the Civil Liberties Union is that there are persons among us who pay their dues and serve on committees, but who do not believe in our program and who mock at us in their hearts, and whose one purpose is to take over the organization and to guide its policies so that it will cease to represent free Americanism and true civil liberties...
...You have only to read one book by Lenin or Stalin to know that it is a fixed, fanatical program...
...With a group of friends, true believers in civil liberties, I attempted to protest against this action...
...I believe in government by consent of the governed...
...His Return of Lanny Budd, eleventh, in the series, was published last year by Viking...
...There are large groups in our country among whom it is unpopular to say this, and I can hear members of these groups exclaiming: "Aha...
...And now, failing to make headway in a free land, the party has adopted a program of camouflage, of what they call "infiltration...
...I believe in social changes brought about by education, organization and the free political process...
...Today, there are no mass arrests of strikers...
...The Soviets were our allies in the defense of freedom against the Hitler dictatorship, and we thought they would remain our friends...
...Sinclair has become a Red-baiter...
...I don't read Russian, and I do not know what they did to my books in those old days, but I think it a safe guess that they cut out all those passages which did not please them—the passages in which I explained the democratic process and the meaning of true civil liberties...
...I take it from one-time fellow-travelers, friends who have been there and seen it and come back and told me...
...Watch out for them...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 28
