Johnny Gates and the CP
SALISBURY, HARRISON
Johnny Gates and the CP The Story of an American Communist. By John Gates. Nelson. 221 pp. $3.95. Reviewed by Harrison E. Salisbury Former N. Y. "Times" correspondent in Moscow I ONCE ASKED a...
...He freely cites his own errors and tries to analyze them where they are susceptible of analysis...
...He sees no possible future in the fragmented socialist movements or the esoteric Communist miniscules...
...He is an idealistic man and it was his ideals, his sense of justice and his determination to fight for the underdog, for a better life, which led him into the Communist party in the depression days...
...It was the depression which was the overriding fact for most of us...
...Then came Spain, a year or two of interlude, then World War II in which Gates volunteered 10 days after Pearl Harbor...
...He places great and appropriate reliance upon American youth...
...There was no special reaso,n for this...
...The most controversial aspect of his book, undoubtedly, is his pronouncement on the future of the Left in America...
...Brave as hell and a damn good soldier...
...Internal peculiarities and radical romanticism played only a minor part in our lives as Communists," Gates writes...
...A real iron commissar...
...But soon Gates was so busy with Party work that he had no time for innovations...
...But they do show plainly that war and combat have been his milieu much more so than the dusty battlefields of dialectic debate...
...But he has given up a movement which no longer stands for the principles of humanity which he once thought it did...
...He was in service until January 1946...
...He and his good friend Frank Carlson got into Party trouble several times by trying to substitute their own ideas for the Party line...
...I kept remembering this description of John Gates as I read his autobiographical sketch, The Story of an American Communist...
...But like the good soldier which he surely was he put the questions aside...
...He was a small, tough little guy...
...But he is confident that new forces are at work in the country...
...He feels that America needs a Left, that it would serve a healthy and wholesome purpose...
...For five years he was on the firing lines of union organizing, the early New Deal days of the CIO, the WPA, hunger marches and bonus demonstrations...
...He feels that the nation may be on the threshold of great political events—a new era similar to that which ushered in the New Deal...
...Sol Regenstreif became John Gates—a name chosen at random out of a newspaper...
...But in prison there was time to think, to read (he had never read George Orwell's 1984 until he went to Atlanta because, as he explains, it was on the index expurgatus and it would have seemed a disloyal act) and to argue and discuss, principally with Eugene Dennis, the Communist party secretary...
...He would like to play a role in this process...
...But in a sense it was a symbol of renunciation...
...Gates looks to 1960...
...The future of the American Left, he believes, lies only within the existing major political parties and specifically within the powerful labor-political movement...
...Reviewed by Harrison E. Salisbury Former N. Y. "Times" correspondent in Moscow I ONCE ASKED a man who had been in Spain whether he had known John Gates during the Civil War...
...He became editor of the Daily Worker and two years later he was indicted under the Smith Act...
...He has a wry wit which enables him to see the ridiculous as well as the serious in many aspects of the Communist world...
...For almost the first time in his life, Gates had the time and opportunity for reflection, for study, for analyzing the Communist movement and what it had come to be...
...From that time on—the autumn of 1932—until January 1958 Gates's life was in the Communist party...
...When he emerged from prison, Gates had some new ideas and had reinforced some old, almost obscured, tendencies toward divergency which he had last manifested back in the earliest days of his "Jimmy Higgins" jobs with the Party—the errand running, pamphlet distribution, mimeographing and other black chores which were the assignment of the City College Young Communist League member of the early 1930s...
...He regards it as dead as a doornail in the United States, dead beyond the faintest possibility of revival...
...At the start Gates was not very well disciplined...
...He is a man of palpable political tenacity and conviction...
...He has no intention of joining in such suicide...
...One of his last romantic acts was his selection of a Party "klichka"—as the Russians would put it—a Party name...
...Again and again you get the feeling that this is a soldier's story, that Gates is a fighting man, at home among fighting men, and that his Communist experience was mostly an accident of time, age and circumstance...
...He feels that the Communist party condemned itself to death by divorcing itself from the American reality...
...Whether Sol deliberatly picked the nom de guerre of the famous "millionaire strap-hanger," John (Betcha-million) Gates, he doesn't say...
...The questions had been piling up in his mind...
...Gates does not waste too much time on the present Communist party...
...It is too much to say that without his term in prison Gates would not have broken with the American Communist party and this book would not have been written...
...No nonsense about him...
...He has given up none of these beliefs...
...He is neither interested in obituaries nor autopsies...
...Certainly, he was moving in the direction of a break...
...He also criticizes the Communist party with a soldierly sense of realism...
...There should be a field in which his energy and talents could be harnessed in the public interest...
...But the truth is, as he sets his story down, that there wasn't very much time for thought or backward glances until a few years ago, when he found himself in Atlanta penitentiary, serving out a five-year term as a result of the famous Foley Square Communist trial...
...We all did...
...The bare outlines of Gates's biography give little of its color, its tempo or its spirit...
...This is not to suggest that Gates is a man of action rather than a man of thought...
...But he does not believe in any existing left-wing movement or organization...
...But whether John Gates can find a place in the Democratic party or in the labor forces attached to it remains to be seen...
...He is confused as to how this may occur...
...However, Gates has his philosophy and it is a compact, coherent kernel of belief which has persisted since the days of his boyhood...
...He makes no excuse for his long service to the Communist cause...
...Of course, I knew Johnny Gates," he replied...
...Gates believes in the Left although he no longer believes in Communism...
Vol. 42 • February 1959 • No. 7
