Revisiting the Red Decade

...After moving to New York in 1937,1 often helped Jessica with Soviet Russia Today...

...The goals of class justice and of peace that they were striving toward half a century ago, though traduced throughout history, are still worth striving toward—and still far, far ahead...

...The piece paid emotional homage to Poland's great leader...

...Richard Morford, chairman of the Council and an alumnus of jail from the McCarthy era, reviewed the organization's troubles before his time, during the difficulties caused by the Hitler-Stalin pact, and in the years immediately afterward (years, I remembered, when fascism, whose threat had brought so many of us into the Party, was presented no longer as a danger but as almost benign...

...He told of the jubilant relief when Germany invaded Russia and the Soviet Union could start fighting on our side...

...Nor had I really read the documents provided us...

...For the original ending reads: And through the power of the word I start my life over Am born to know who you are To give you your name Liberty It was the dream of liberty that had inspired Eluard, it was liberty he was fighting for against the occupying Germans...

...Now I was escaping once again as I had after 1939...

...It was as if no conflicting revelations had subsequently clouded the dream of class justice, freedom and equality for which we could keep struggling then with high hearts in the belief that it had already come true in the Soviet Union...

...His memory of Jessica went back 50 years, he said, to the time the Soviet Union was recognized by the United States...

...The black actress Ruby Dee, after her personal eulogy, recited a poem by Paul Eluard announced as "Peace...

...Hope Hale Davis, a long-time contributor to The New Leader, has been spending the current academic year at Radcliffe College as a Fellow of the Mary Ingraham Bunting Institute...

...Like the other speakers, Troyanovsky emphasized Jessica's work for peace...

...What we built here," General Wojciech Jaruzelski was quoted as claiming for martial law, "was a bridge rather than a barricade...

...Speaking of the big 1943 rally, "Salute to Our Gallant Soviet Ally," he asked how many of his listeners had been in Madison Square Garden that night...

...To the question of whether or not they were guilty, a moment's independent thinking would have shown me that there was no good answer...

...It was as if I had been caught in a time warp...

...The Old Bolsheviks whose basic treatises had been our guides were being forced to abase themselves, to confess fantastic crimes, and they then were executed...

...My mere presence accorded me the warm acceptance from her that I remembered in my Party days, when an introduction by a comrade as a "friend," or even an expressive nod by a comrade, was enough to establish the instant trust and sense of shared purpose that was so inspiriting...

...Every seat in the Ethical Culture Society' s auditorium on Manhattan's West 64th Street was filled...

...and the USSR to a roller coaster, with the downward longer than the upward rides...

...Often repeated in the speeches that afternoon was the statement that the Soviet Union, besides giving a helping hand to all countries trying to throw off bondage (I couldn't help thinking of Hungary, Czechoslovakiaand Afghanistan), was the indefatigable supporter of peace and social progress everywhere...

...In the midst of this, I recently had the dizzying experience of finding myself in a hall full of people for whom history had stopped in that decade...

...She called me once in desperation when a new feature, a page of Soviet humor, was giving her trouble—as well it might have, for neither here nor there were Communists great sources of comedy...

...Jessica, he further observed, had met with Soviet leaders on her trips abroad and learned at first hand how inviolable was their commitment to their principle: People Come First...

...She shook her head...

...As Dee read the last verse, with its change of form, and then the final, lone, isolated word "Peace," I was incredulous...

...Instead, I figured out ways of answering the doubts of my liberal friends...

...What struck me at once about the audience was its homogeneity...

...From her unchanged manner toward me I had to believe her...

...As a rare reward, Jessica would sometimes wangle permission for a chosen comrade to attend one of the lavish receptions...

...When Sergei Prokofief came to this country I was assigned to interview him, but before the date we were to meet he was called home, suddenly...

...Of course, they had not...

...This publication had taken the place of Soviet Russia Today, itself an outgrowth of a news bulletin Jessica had produced in the elegant new Soviet Embassy during the first years after U.S...

...I found it hard enough to comprehend my own blind obedience during the '30s...

...AN HOUR OUT OF TIME Revisiting the Red Decade by hope hale davis Cambridge Since last September, I have been spending my days at Radcliffe's Bunting Institute, trying to relive and understand my years as a New Dealer and member of the Communist underground in Roosevelt's Washington of the 1930s...

...Could they really believe all this, as they seemed to...

...If they were, if they had collaborated with Hitler (as of course Stalin himself would do in 1939), what did it say about the strength and purity of the Communist ideals...

...The paradox of sensational luxury being provided by the Socialist country where millions were hungry tickled the fancy of the capital's socialites...

...She had not heard of it...

...I was satisfied that my trick worked with doubters, or seemed to...

...Having waited too long to detach illusion from reality by confronting the Soviet betrayal of their dream, they dare not open their eyes for fear of robbing their whole lives of meaning...

...Eluard, famous as the poet of the Resistance, had been known chiefly for this very poem among those who had been exalted by it in their courageous fight against the Germans...

...We comrades gleefully told each other that the Soviet Union was simply saying to the capitalists, "Anything you can do we can do better...

...He gave a sermon praising Jessica for her dedication to telling the truth about the country that would always be a "leader in the fight for democratic rights of the people, and peace for humankind...

...Nevertheless, I would have denied fiercely that I was protecting my faith from the truth...

...It was not peace they were fighting for, however...

...And that was the period of the "show" trials in Moscow...

...Mountains of caviar were served from exquisitely sculptured ice, and gallons of champagne went down the throats of the Washington elite...

...According to the labored illogic of the author (who had once been my secretary and, I am startled to recall, was recruited by me for the Party), the iron rule was received with a huge sigh of relief by the populace...

...He compared relations between the U.S...

...In 19371 had heard of Andre Gide's Return from the USSR, but I would not have soiled my hands with the book, much less have read it...

...Yet I doubt if there were 10 young people present...

...I sat shaken by a sense of unreality...

...Henry Winston, the black national chairman of the Communist Party USA, aged and infirm, was helped to the podium...

...it was part of their best young hopes, their highest and most self-transcendent striving toward goals that were worth any personal sacrifice...

...I did not wonder about the reason for my resistance, though...

...peace had been bought at too high a price by their enemies, the collaborationists...

...The elderly hands clapped up a thunder...

...In a spirit of nostalgic affection, admittedly mingled with some political interest, I went to a memorial for Jessica Smith...

...How had she justified it to herself...

...I left the auditorium deeply disoriented...

...Those old people who lingered inside, as if physically clinging to a world of illusion, had not been able to free themselves...

...his apologetic letter, still in my possession, does not say why...

...But so many facts had since been revealed that could not be dismissed the way we dismissed the hints in those days —as propaganda from a poisoned capitalist source...

...I would ask...

...Labeling Solidarity's leaders pro-fascist, "professional destabilizers of socialism," the article spoke scornfully of the slogans "More Freedom," "Greater Democracy" and "True Equality...

...I sat looking at Jessica that day in perplexity...

...In a smiling threat he remarked that, more than her medals and awards from the Soviet Union, she deserved honors for her efforts from her own country, which needed greater protection from the danger of nuclear war...

...But liberty is a forbidden word in Communist countries...

...Harris used the occasion here to extol the Soviet agricultural system as of ineffable benefit to the people...

...Hundreds of elderly hands shot up, as eager as kindergartners to show and tell...

...One device was simple but effective...

...At the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact and the outbreak of World War II, I married and moved away both from New York and from the Party...

...For some reason, perhaps because we misunderstood the Soviet plans for the future of women, the magazine never went to press...

...There is an answer to the puzzle: The dream was too precious...

...I had not seen Jessica during all the decades, until the past summer...

...The audience responded passionately to these statements...

...She lay on her bed happily showing me pictures of her two-year-old step-great-granddaughter...

...I carried the quandary with me to the memorial meeting, sponsored by New World Review and the National Council for American-Soviet Friendship...

...She was the wife of Hal Ware, who until his death in an automobile accident in 1935 was our much loved organizer, in charge of all the underground Communist groups in Washington...

...Jessica had spent half a century explaining the truth away...

...They even seemed to resemble each other: the same dark-browed intentness, oddly touched with a hopeful expectancy more natural to youth...

...Praising her pamphlet, "Soviet Democracy and How it Works," Harris rather ingenuously exclaimed, "What she could do with that old typewriter was amazing...

...I had reviewed the Random House anthology of 20th-century French poetry and I knew the work, but not by that title...

...Its very existence, we were told, had a profound effect on every aspect of life, because in the USSR, "the workers and farmers determine what kind of society they live in...

...In a voice trembling with emotion she read perhaps a dozen of the quatrains, each ending with the line "I write your name...

...This is sad...

...Curiously enough, the only speech at the memorial with a tinge of irony was by the Soviet ambassador to the United Nations, Oleg Troyanovsky...

...The woman beside me, pleasant and well dressed, was a sort of microcosmic puzzle in herself...

...Since then they have been more or less running in place—limited to activities that support their early allegiance...

...It is what Solidarity is struggling for in Poland, what the dissidents keep on martyring themselves for in the Soviet Union...

...perhaps he was peering down from some upper regions on the night I took the hand of his father, Aleksandr, at the head of the new embassy's marble stairway...

...At her death in October at age 88 her name was listed as editor emeritus on the masthead of New WorldReview...

...And so history and truth give way to the current line, just as they did for me in the 1930s...

...One of the eulogies was given by Lem Harris, a cheery man who looked younger than he had a right to, for I remembered learning about him as a secret colleague organizing farmers while I was working within the confines of the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration...

...A Russian, she quite frankly described her departure from the Soviet Union as an escape through a temporary loophole...

...recognition of the USSR in 1933...

...Yet she was a devoted member of what she called "the organization...

...Have you read the transcripts of the trials...

...This was the magazine that had run an article ardently praising the imposition of martial law in Poland...

...While real horrors were occurring in the Soviet Union (I realize now), I rewrote as a big splash story the Russian dispatches describing the flight of the Soviet aviators over the North Pole...

...I took the opportunity to clear away any misconception: Had she read Nadezhda Man-delstam's book, Hope Against Hope...

...In those days I did not let such logic come to mind...

...Recalling the group of 40 Americans who went to help organize Russian collective farms in 1929, he told how Jessica, accompanying Hal Ware, "smoothed things over" when the unfamiliar lacks, discomforts and restrictions of their situation caused the agricultural experts to quarrel among themselves...

...Actually, of course, the doubts remained to plague our hardworking Party members, causing suspicion and even ostracism when they tried to lead struggles to build unions and fight exploitation and terror in the factories and fields...

...He must have been a small child then, I thought...

...In August, wanting to draw the threads of my life together, and knowing Jessica was frail, I went to visit her...

...Through hot summer nights Jessica and I also put together a new magazine to be called, I believe, Woman Today...

...Asking my name, my neighbor translated it lovingly into Russian: Nadezhda...

...If they were not (and it already was known that the hotel where Trotsky was accused of plotting treason did not exist on the date of his alleged assignation there), the trials themselves were proof of the most monstrous conspiracy of all...

...How had she been able to keep on publishing misinformation all this time...

...Looking like any sweet old lady, her blue eyes bright with pride, she told me how her continuing work on New World Review could, if only briefly, make her forget her pain...

...Almost everyone present was well over 70...