Looking Back at My Years in the Party

...e , what served the Party purposes in a given situation Truth was always relative, never absolute—except for the one mviolable rule that it must always protect and promote the interests of the Soviet Union Karl accepted the tactical necessity of this (though he was never put to the test of the 1936 Moscow "show trials," having escaped by then into his world of delusion) Lack of candor in personal relationships, however, went against the grain He found it hard, after winning the confidence of a chief he respected, to betray this faith by turning over to the Party the documents and secrets with which he had been trusted Working in the shipping section of NRA, he made regular trips to New York and gave a Party contact on the waterfront privileged advance information about plans for labor negotiations with seamen He came home rather subdued Listening to his dry comments on the cloak and dagger methods required of him, I thought he was simply tired By an unfair irony of Fate?or perhaps the Party's normal male chauvinism—nothing painful was asked of me I was allowed to enjoy my job in the Agricultural Adjustment Administration, reformist though it was, and exult in each triumph over the old-line publicity people who were always on guard against the danger of our giving the consumer any real information about np-offs by middlemen or adulteration by food processors Milton Eisenhower, Chief of Information of the Department of Agriculture, a handsome man of such great courtesy that I was never sure he was not on our side, gave me useful lessons, whether intentional or not "No, I wouldn't say white bread is exactly poison' I had my chief answer an imaginary worried query on a radio program, then, with that fatal word firmly in the listener's mind, he told of the damage done by bleaching to the nutriments of wheat Sometimes the Party assigned me to drive over to the mysterious house near the Capitol and collect the literature To creep down the dark cellar steps, fumble for the great bundles, and drag them back through the dimness to the rumble seat of my little Ford stirred me in a way that made Karl shake his head "Crazy, crazy," he would murmur in wonder that was partly envy Reading the periodicals was another matter We were expected to master the contents of all of them, national and international For Karl this was no problem, he had a need to know what the Party was saying I lacked this need At the last possible minute, on Sunday afternoon, when my little daughter had gone to her nap, I would face reality The covers of harsh black and white or glaring red intimidated me, but I read quickly and hard Though I did not admit it, I felt as I had on the Sunday afternoons of my youth when I plowed through my weekly assignment in the Christian Herald Above each article my mother had marked a price—usually 10 cents, sometimes 15, and for the occasional difficult or important one 25 These sums made up my allowance as I went into my teens What I chiefly learned from this reading—as I did from sermons in church —was a trick of having words slide in and out of my consciousness without leaving a mark 1 he habit handicapped me as a Marxist What did not escape me in Party literature was its rhetoric Here, I thought, was a niche where I could be helpful With a close comrade, Manan Bach-rach, who later rose to the next-to-highest rank m the national leadership, I produced a handbook for Party "agitprop " It was meant to teach writers a crisp, modern style using active verbs and specific examples, rather than obsolete windy phrases like "bourgeois lickspittle," "capitalist lackeys" and "running dogs of imperialism " A glance at Party usage m this country and abroad suggests that our handbook must have been dropped very hastily into the wastebasket In the spring of 1935—possibly because it meant a temporary escape from the day-to-day deceit required by his government job—Karl got Party permission to work on a research project being organized by Professor Carter Goodrich, with whom he had studied at Columbia His colleagues there would be largely old friends, none of them Communists For the moment he was at peace Alter a few months, though, as the study was drawing to a close and the final reports were coming due, he began to have trouble with his conclusion The discoveries he had made in his research, along with his observations of what was happening in the country, had shaken some of his ideas Karl had come into the New Deal sure that its piecemeal approach would not work "Roosevelt is like a bund sculptor," he had told me But now as he looked around him at its results and pondered the data he had worked up, extrapolating it into the future, he wondered if he had been right It did seem that reforms like Roosevelt's might go far to correct the social inefficiencies of unrestrained capitalism, which in those days of cnsis even capitalists were granting was a failure This was heresy to the Communists Violent revolution was held to be inevitable Considering the idea of "gradualism" even tacitly, as a product of his figures, laid Karl open to furious tirades from the comrades One of the most vituperative was George Silverman, who broke all underground rules by bursting into our house without warning to shout his protests in the leaning of our guests That week Karl, the most unmelo-dramatic of men, confided to me that his colleagues at the project were making carefully concerted plans to unmask him as a fraud Soon he was weaving his fears into a world-wide plot involving Hitler A year later, after a course of insulin shock treatments, he seemed to be emerging from these delusions Then, in February 1937, at the time of the second session of "show trials" in the Soviet Union, he managed to find a belt and hang himself The possible meaning of Karl's tragedy did not break through the wall of my Party loyalty, which was only strengthened by my visit to J Peters When I was given my new assignment I accepted it without a second thought It was innocuous enough, on the surface I was merely to allow someone to use the inner, windowless room of my Bank Street apartment for storing and working on certain files that had to be kept safe from any possible raid on Headquarters The comrade who came each day was a solid, serious, reliable looking man He said he had once been an immigrant from Latvia, a hatter, but he had returned to the Soviet Union, where his wife and small son were He had a touchingly lonesome air, which was understandable since his only contacts in this country were Earl Brovvder and me On the days when my little girl had to stay home from nursery school he gave her wistful attention All I knew of his work I gathered from one unsuppressed exclamation of anger against "these Trotskyites " Proudly incurious, I did not ask what an important secret emissary from the Soviet apparatus could be doing, day after day, leafing over documents about Trotskyites Much later I learned of the FBI's assumption that his job had been to plan Leon Trotsky's assassination If I had suspected that an axe murder was being hatched in my inner room, would I have found a way to accept it...

...Karl admitted that he was ambitious He had only recently changed his profession, turning from a successful start as an engineer to take a doctorate in economics But his interests were wide-ranging His great pleasure was in adding to his library of rare books on abstruse subjects I did not realize until afterward how much he needed his hours with them, reading and reflecting Nor did I see how momentous the decision was for him to surrender his career—and his thinking—to the control of others I was impatient My unconscious rang with echoes "Faith without works is dead " "By their fruits ye shall know them " "Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with thy might " In that period of passionate conviction I could not understand anyone's being merely a theoretical Marxist My faith in the future—Mother's faith in Providence, really—was apparently infectious Karl and I married and joined the Party almost simultaneously For me it was the ideal solution I could rebel against my childhood and yet act in harmony with the conscience it had given me At first Karl and I were in the same small unit, of which all the other members were stalwarts who have been named often as part of Hal Ware's original nucleus in 1933 Soon its numbers grew, though, and Karl was put in charge of a new umt comprising brilliant but unstable statisticians and economists One of the most neurotic, I gathered from Karl's wry remarks, was George Silverman (Two years later he, along with Alger Hiss and Harry Dexter White, would receive a Bokhara rug from Whittaker Chambers as a gift "from the Russian people in gratitude to their American comrades ")Karl used all his talents to ease these prima donnas into Party harness With his solid Marxist grounding and his gently humorous sense of proportion he was able to settle his umt's frenzied doctrinaire disputes and keep his specialists producing the valuable information available to them in their rapidly rising positions Attending weekly unit meetings was a comrade's first duty After a day of the frantic activity then going on in all New Deal offices, it was a long, toilsome evening Part was spent in discussion of our current job situations with advice on strategy—whether to try to influence policy or simply to achieve promotion—a primary goal We were all encouraged to maintain an outwardly conventional bourgeois household and help ease our way upward by entertaining the night people, the more conservative the better We were to avoid the outspoken liberals who abounded at the time m Washington I had to turn my back on Gardner Jackson, who had covered the Bonus March in 1932 with Claud, driving the old Essex coupe he had driven in 1926 to deliver 300,000 petitions to the Massachusetts State House in the effort to save Sacco and Vanzetti It was through him that I had found my job But I followed Party orders Next on the meeting agenda was a survey of world news, with an analysis by one comrade of a specific event Listening to these earnest, laborious reports, I tried not to be reminded of Christian Endeavor meetings, but the similarity was inescapable I can see Victor Perlo now, young and ardent, drawing a map of China on a child's blackboard with a different color of chalk for each province as he traced the route of the Long March being led by Chu Teh, Chou En-lai and Mao Tse-tung We all tried to become as sure of the location of the Huang Ho and the Hang-shui as of the Mississippi and the Hudson The rest of the evening—no small part—was occupied with sale of literature and collection of dues This was painful to many comrades also helping to support families hard hit by the Depression We were not allowed to go near the one newsstand in Washington where Leftist publications were sold, but here we were under pressure to buy the whole week's issues of the Daily Worker plus perhaps 10 other official CP periodicals Any secret directives —for purloining official documents, making contacts with Party operatives elsewhere, or the like—were given to individual comrades after the general meeting broke up Karl spent a second evening each week with the other unit leaders and the functionary who was our liaison with New York Initially this was Hal Ware, w hose casual, commonsense w av ot applying Marxism won Karl completely Hal's sudden death in August 1935, though it hit us all hard, was devastating to Karl, who had just accepted his most difficult assignment and had counted on Hal's support and counsel in carrying it out On the way home from an idyllic day on a Virginia mountaintop picnicking with his two children, Hal had proposed Karl's task to ingratiate himself with the local Nazis and become a regular guest at the German Embassy At our first reception there, watching Lem Riefenstahl respond to Karl's easy, natural manner, I felt only pride in the way he accomplished his Party mission, unaware of what it had to have cost him For he must have seen clearly—it would have scared me if I had only looked—just where success in this assignment might lead him Apart from the repellent Nazi angle, Karl hated deception The conspiratorial methods we had to practice in our assignments—and indeed in our whole lives—did not give him the thrills they gave me On the one occasion when I stole a document from a government specialist's file my heart raced with excitement as I tiptoed through the marble halls in the Sunday silence, though the "document" was a formula for soybean milk that Henry Wallace was more than eager to give to the world Karl had a real need to be on the level with colleagues who trusted him, whereas I found it fun to formulate remarks to my chief that would suggest a quite different attitude on the turbulence in Spain from the intense pro-Loyalist passion I really felt "Thou shaft not he" had been rigorously enforced in Mother's household If she had the smallest doubt of what we said, there was a heavy scene with tears, Bible sessions and impromptu prayers on our knees During one especially lengthy supplication for the Holy Spirit to move an erring sibling, I opened my eyes and saw my mother's hand gathering her skirt into a bunch over her thigh Only when the prayer was over did she calmly dispose of the mouse that had crept up her leg, then proceed to discipline my 16-year-old brother with a yardstick until he confessed the actual number of hours he had spent with some girl the night before Mother held herself, we gradually learned, to slightly different standards The end—if a religious one, if it would result in bringing some other soul nearer to Christ—could justify means that we began to question She answered our objections with significant emphasis "A lie is a falsehood told with the intention to deceive " And added, "We must be wise as serpents and harmless as doves ' (Long afterwards I learned that doves were the most aggressive of birds) Listening to Mother's careful definitions as we carried the milk and butter down the stone walk to the well, where we hung the tray deep in the cold darkness, I worked out her system It gave her two options She could tell someone something meant to deceive, so long as it was technically not a falsehood, or she could tell a falsehood if it was not meant—in the end, seen in a larger context—to deceive I knew Mother devised her statements after exhaustive prayer and Bible study, and I respected her seriousness I did not realize what an exciting challenge these artful inventions were to her ingenuity, and what creative pleasure—though she hid this from herself—they must have given her But I experienced it in my turn as a member of the Washington underground Karl's background was entirely different He was baptized as a Catholic But at the beginning of World War I, his Bavarian mother, observing that both the German and Allied priests claimed the backing of God when they exhorted then young men to kill brothers and cousins on the other side, left the Church This was the kind of honesty Karl grew up with Reading Marx he was attracted to a scientific, objective approach to social problems It seemed to fit in with his own devotion to truth But once in the Party we all had to accept a quite different orientation Truth as such did not exist for us As Communists we learned to say—and most of us to think, quite automatically—not what was factually accurate but what was "correct...

...Did I anticipate Freud?Maybe all children do In any case, the weight on my soul drove me to confess My sins changed quality as I grew older, but the need for a clear conscience kept all its force Two decades later, drawn by the same urgency, I made my way to the Ninth Floor of the New York headquarters of the Communist Party to confess to J Peters, head of underground activity For three years—like the other members of Hal Ware's secret Washington group—I had spoken the words "Ninth Floor" in a tone of awe "This is a directive straight from the Ninth Floor " Or, as often, terrifyingly "He's been called to the Ninth Floor to explain " Now as the old freight elevator slowly moved upward it seemed to groan with the load of trouble I earned I bore on my conscience the unforgivable sin of loose talk Over a drink with Joe Freeman, editor of the New Masses, I had given a hint of my recent connection with the Washington underground We were under strict orders not to let its existence be suspected by the most trusted comrades outside Membership was not to be divulged even to fellow-traveling husbands and wives 1 was out of the group in 1937, having moved to New York But I felt no relaxation of Party discipline I was ready for the punishment my indiscretion deserved It did not occur to me —a good Communist was above such thoughts—to use my obvious excuse A young mother with a small daughter to support, I had just spent an agonizing 18 months trying to get help for my husband in mental hospitals At the end of his most hopeful treatments he had committed suicide Karl's breakdown had come after a year in the Party During his confinement his psychiatrists had given van ous reasons why a notably sane man should suddenly lose touch with reality Dr Frieda Fromm-Reichmann (recently divorced from Erich Fromm and later to become a cult figure, heroine of the novel / Never Promised You a Rose Garden) blamed his illness on lack of love in what by all accounts had been a warm and happy childhood Though I had confided Karl's membership in the Party, she gave it no importance Indeed, he had taken his tasks so matter-of-factly that I myself had not realized how deep was the conflict between his open, scholarly temperament and our conspiratorial requirements 1 had laughed at his cautious consideration of the consequences of each assignment he was given To me it was all so simple Once I accepted leadership, I followed orders with the carefree eagerness of a child who is "being good " Until this last tune I was sure something very grun was in store for me I remembered the tongue-lashing Karl had taken from J Peters, whom we had been taught to call "Steve " One evening in 1935 a group of about 15 comrades had gathered at the smart new Virginia home of Lee Pressman, who later as counsel for the CIO would guide John L Lewis and his powerful mine workers' union along the zigzags of the Communist line Probably half a dozen of the men were, like Karl, leaders of "units," the separate cells of five or six members into which each of Hal Ware's groups was subdivided The rest of us made up a sort of semi-social elite, privileged to be in on any exciting event One time it was a merry visit from Mother Bloor who, in contrast to the typical rather dour functionary, represented the Party's concession to human earthiness She was also Hal Ware's real-life mother This meeting was very serious We had been invited to ask questions, bring up problems that bothered us Steve, who had made one of his descents on Washington like a god in a Greek play, would give the word from on high At first the questions were about techniques, choices between acceptable Party methods Then Karl's turn came He was a natural intellectual whose learning was not limited to his profession as an economist He asked if it would not be more effective for the Party press to refute Sidney Hook's new book by philosophical argument than by personal invective He had already planned how he could demolish Hook's points But Steve turned on him in a fury, shouting that he had fouled the air by mentioning the filth spewed out by that renegade Entering Steve's office on the Ninth Floor and beginning mv confession, 1 expected a response even harsher For Karl's error had been well-intentioned Mine, though a slip, had been inexcusable ("I didn't mean to" was never permitted by my mother "You must mean not to," she would answer with a sharp cut of the peach twig on my bare leg ) To my amazement Steve listened with a gentle smile, then reached out and stroked my hair In my vulnerable state the gesture was deeply moving Steve's reasons for his kindness subsequently became clear The Washington secret, if secret it still was, had been safe with Joe Freeman, whose brother, I have since been told, was a seasoned Soviet agent Also, to a shrewd organizer hke J Peters my confession chiefly proved how reliable I was Experience must long before have taught him a paradoxical fact I have been slow to understand that the conscientious type of comrade, brought up to "do right," could best be depended on to he, steal and deceive successfully, persistently and with least danger of detection It was as if one's conscience, already strongly functioning, need only be given a quarter-turn so that the needle pointed east instead of north, and then the world could be faced with a look of clear-eyed rectitude Steve had another, more compelling reason for not shaking my confidence At that moment he was planning an assignment requiring just my kind of trustful, willing compliance—an assignment that the Party, by its own dubious standards, regarded as far more vital than any I had been given in Washington I had joined the Ware group in the fall of 1934, after returning from a trip to England In London I had gone to neighborhood Party meetings with Claud Cockburn, then mv husband, and Jean Ross Claud, later editor of the British Daily Worker, was at the time a covert Communist establishing his behind-the-news bulletin, The week Its startling disclosures of facts that the newspapers' interests prevented them from publishing were making it essential reading in the top echelons of government and business Claud's combination of wit, garety and vividly iconoclastic thinking had charmed me while he was a junior New York correspondent for the London Twits During out brief marriage 1 had been greatly impressed by his rejection of the glittering prizes the Times offered in the effort not to lose him Instead he had chosen a chancy, unguessable future as a revolutionary But that was the way history was going, he explained, if he had been born a century earlier he would have delighted in being an empire builder Now that period was over, the 1929 crash of the stock market (which he had predicted accurately, to the benefit of speculating friends) had been the end of the old order Claud's talk revived certain feelings in me that were probably far from the tough, mischievous schemes playing in his own mind The altruism implanted in my childhood was too deeply rooted for me to feel quite easy about the life I was living As a product of the '20s, I was a rebel against that early training, dividing my energies between fun and getting on in the world I was Promotion Manager of the old Life magazine, a job never given to a woman before, and was being wooed by a topflight advertising agency But underneath my blithe pretense that this was all just a game was a nagging awareness of the false values I was using my talents to sell And most of the world, it seemed, was hungry and out of work All I was doing about that was buying an apple each morning from the unemployed architect who waited at the entrance of my building Meanwhile miles of makeshift shacks were giving every city its Hooverville Less visible were the long-time slums, festering with crime, disease and racial injustice So many problems' What could one person do...

...I knew a woman who spent exhausting days getting orphans into homes Yet with all her kowtowing to the society patronesses who ran her adoption agency, how many of the thousands of children could she place...

...A MEMOIR Looking Back at My %ars in the Party by hope hale davis It has taken me a long time to understand how I happened to become a faithful, reliable member of the Washington Communist underground in the '30s I'm sure now that my strict moral training as a child made this quite natural My most intense early memory is of lying in bed at night anxiously reviewing the hours of the day for any sin I might have committed Before I could sleep I had to go down and confess each one to my mother, a widow who was bringing up her five children according to her own rigorous version of Christianity I was the youngest, a posthumous child, born too late to share with my siblings the tempering influence of my father Sometimes there was a long inner struggle before I crept down the dark stairway of the big brick house my great grandfather had built as a pioneer The hall was full of menacing shadows, and in the Iowa winters was fiercely cold On the worst nights my mother put well-wrapped hot flatirons between the icy sheets The smell of scorching newsprint was the coziest scent I knew A strong conscience was needed to pull me from that gradually warming bed Even so, the summertime sins were hardest to confess Once a little girl named Hazel, of mysterious and slightly dubious origin, came to play with me When she had to go to the outhouse I gallantly escorted her After a time she said she needed "pepper" Surprised, I asked what for She answered with a gesture Ever hospitable, I hurried to the dining room for the shaker, up-ended my little friend and proceeded to enthusiastically pepper her bottom Had I really misunderstood her pronunciation...

...If either money or susceptibility to Nazi doctrine could make those Founding Fathers plot with Hitler, how strong was Communist principle...

...If they were innocent, then the trials themselves were the monstrous conspiracy I can't believe that I would have been a knowing—no matter how reluctant—accessory to such a crime But how can I be absolutely sure...

...I knew a woman lawyer involved in juvenile delinquency, but her tales of the jammed, inefficient courts and corrupt, hasty, indifferent judges were only discouraging To Claud none of this seemed hopeless His talk suggested that it would be possible, in the United States as in the Soviet Union, to sweep away all these disgraces at once and build a new society that would make such problems impossible Sharing such heady dreams set free the repressed ideals of childhood My mother had instilled in us—and enforced—the obligation to help others less fortunate How they could be less fortunate than our family we did not question In my first years, before Mother could return to work as a teacher, she supported her five children on an income often as low as $10 or $15 a month, supplemented by gift boxes from her family Once she made a shirt for my brother out of 43 pieces of sprigged muslin, some of them hardly an inch long, with the pattern matching so that the joinings did not show Starched and proud, we could hold up our heads in church, where we never missed a service And always our envelope was dropped into the collection plate, containing exactly one-tenth of any cash that had come into the house, including what my oldest brother earned by chopping wood for neighbors Sometimes Mother even managed an extra contribution for some especially needy foreign mission Later it would seem quite natural to hand over $30 of my $300 monthly New Deal salary to the Party, plus a frequent assessment for some organizer facing danger and privation in the South Whenever a child began to worry over what our tithing did to the family economy, Mother made us see that it was actually a sure-fire form of insurance We need concern ourselves only with following God's precepts, as interpreted by her, and we would have nothing to fear Thus a clear conscience was firmly linked in me to a sense of security that remained unshaken by catastrophe My trip in 1934 was only partly political It followed a long period of waiting, first for our baby to be born, then for Claud to find revolutionary work for me in England This kept being delayed Meantime I had joined the New Deal—and I had met Karl, who was insisting that decisions be made In London I found Claud involved with the beautiful, 22-year-old Jean Ross, who was just back from a turbulent period in Germany "She's supposed to have slept with over 200 men in Berlin," I wrote Karl But she did not seem the type Instinctively I shared the doubts Christopher Isherwood suggested in his portrait of her as Miss Sally Bowles, which at that moment he must have been creating Claud had taught Jean a regard for the working class that she adopted at face value without his humorous, self-protective cynicism Before he could stop her she had stopped herself of a substantial inheritance by impulsive generosities But this was no fleeting whim Through all her life, totally indifferent to the sensation caused by her persona in / Am a Camera and Cabaret, she was to spend her days in tireless drudgery for the Party In 1934 there were hunger marches to be organized, rallies of the unemployed, protests against fascism After a month of helping with these and tak mysterious messages that came from sources close to Hitler, I sailed home hot for action in America Karl was being pressed to join the Party by a colleague at the National Recovery Administration (NRA), John Donovan, a former fellow graduate student at Columbia University Karl's own thinking, as I saw it, made this the inevitable next step A naturalized American who had been through war, famine, inflation, and abortive democracy in his native Germany, he was watching Hitler's unchecked advances with alarm According to his reasoning, the Communists, who seemed most aware of the Nazi menace, could with their disciplined international cadres fight it most effectively and also build a new, rational society Why, then, I asked, did he hesitate...

...I honestly thought so—at least with the conscious part of my mind But then why did I feel wicked...

...I had accepted the show trials of the Old Bolsheviks, though a moment's free thinking would have told me there was no good answer to the question, "Guilty or innocent...

...As a 12-year-old I lay awake listening in deep anxiety for my mother's weeping Imagining I heard her, I crept down and stood for hours outside the bedroom door where she slept with my stepfather Sometimes the sobs and the wild, heartbroken and yet voluptuous cries were real Mother could become hysterical in order to wring from her husband a promise of Christianity Any means was justified if it furthered the Kingdom of God We Communists, convinced that the cause we served was vital to the ultimate good of the world, could be sure that whatever we did to promote it was good Just as in childhood I had learned a Christian pity for the benighted ones outside the fold, I could quite honestly feel superior now to those "confused" liberals who were still making judgments by obsolete bourgeois codes of right and wrong, truth and dishonor We could raise our heads and face the world proudly while actually living a he The sense of purpose binding the few against the many can keep people enthralled for a lifetime Almost none of the comrades I knew best in the Washington underground have broken away, through decades marked by Khrushchev's revelations of the Stalin terror, by Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Solzhemtsyn, Ginzburg, and Shchar-ansky It took me several years in a liberating marriage, out of range of pressures, to free my conscience from its blind loyalties Even now, when I hear the name of a comrade from the '30s, my first feeling—before I have time to think of all the Gulags—is a flash of warmth, of closeness The power of commitment to a cause is still mysteriously strong, still capable of holding its followers to the old directive, "Be ye faithful unto death...

...Where would you start...