two who turned
GATES, JOHN
two who turned THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM IN AMERICA by JOHN GATES Tn the 27 years since I joined the Communist Party, my ideas of how socialism will be attained in the United States and what it...
...Agronsky: Can you get it...
...Many, more than 20 of the leading writers of the Soviet Union, were brutally beaten and tortured and executed—action toward writers which no other civilized country on earth has taken in our time...
...It was a feeling of deep and sick horror because he felt he was looking into a mirror...
...They live with other people, they want a world, a condition of brotherhood, of love, of understanding, of social progress and advancement...
...Few Americans as yet believe in socialism, but many are interested in fundamental reforms that fall short of socialism but are necessary for its achievement...
...For example, in the Spanish War against Franco, the cream of Great Britain's intellectuals and young writers actually died fighting in Spain...
...Agronsky: Do you feel it is a price you'd be willing to pay...
...Fast: —than it was then...
...I was in motion...
...They have been deeply concerned with these questions in their writing...
...Fast...
...On the other hand, the Communist Party condemned it bitterly and savagely because it was a book with severe psychological and psychoanalytical trends and intonations in it...
...Today it's—it's incomprehensible to me...
...Now, I say this from my point of view in the past decade in America...
...It was a book that was described as brutalistic, as sadistic, as anti-human by their standards...
...Agronsky: But, Mr...
...Agronsky: Forever, Mr...
...It tells him what not to write...
...What did you feel you could accomplish then...
...Fast: Well, you read a book and you reread it...
...Many of my best friends never came back...
...Let me put this question in this sense...
...Fast, this is, perhaps, a brutal question...
...Agronsky: A destruction of the spirit...
...It had gobbled up the Baltic countries —Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia...
...How can any writer write as a free man and be a Communist...
...Had not Communism demonstrated it was another form of Fascism at this point...
...All people of good will, to one degree or another, want a condition of brotherhood...
...The only honorable thing a Communist can do in our time is to leave the Communist Party forever...
...I said to myself, "Well, there's no open and shut case here...
...Now, Ignazio Silone, a man for whom I have the greatest respect, a man of deep integrity and honor, saw this thing in 1939...
...I could not hold back my feelings...
...We had two extremely moving books, that provided a documentation, by writers you respect...
...I don't want to go into any story—you haven't the time for it—and this isn't the place for a detailed story of my struggles, or my twisting and turning, my rebellion, my fight within this organization to write as I please...
...It never occurred to me that this movement, based on a theory of change as Marxism is supposed to be, might find itself left behind by the changes in American life itself...
...If I joined the Communist Party in order to work for democracy, peace, and socialism, my leaving on January 10 of this year was for the same purpose...
...I heard Gates say that when in prison, serving five years for being a Communist, he took out of the prison library 1984 and he read it...
...Fast is the author of many novels and biographies, including "Freedom Road," "Citizen Tom, Payne," and "Spartacus...
...None can claim even as much success as the Communist Party...
...Those obsessed with hostility to the Communist countries as their chief reason for existence lack independence just as much as do the Communists and, however unwittingly, help sustain the cold war and domestic witchhunts...
...So long as he who leaves can be so designated, then fewer will leave...
...This new program called for a peaceful, constitutional American path to socialism...
...In other words, my—my— Agronsky: The source of belief was there...
...Agronsky: I am willing to...
...They see, at a point in their lives, and at a point in the history of our time, an organization which promises them that this organization and only this organization can bring their beliefs into effective action...
...When Russia declared a thing was a slander, I believed it was a slander...
...Many writers were expelled...
...This is the terrible truth of our time...
...Fast...
...The body of theory on which the Party had always based itself, the ideas of Marx and Lenin, were henceforth to be interpreted by the American Communists for America and not by Communists abroad for the American Party...
...They are what made us feel more "correct" than any other political movement of the time...
...I feel the need to think, to study, to listen to others, to discuss and debate...
...And I don't want to, I will not, but I could name a dozen such people whose lives were shattered because they did something that the Party does not permit...
...They were no part of the Russian scene...
...Agronsky: What does the Party do to a writer in the sense of telling a writer what to write...
...Agronsky: This is a spiritual fear of which you speak now...
...The price I am paying now is an internal price which I'll overcome...
...Soon after I joined the Party, I left school and home and became a "full-timer," throwing myself into the unemployment, labor union, and anti-Fascist struggles of the Thirties...
...John Gates, editor of the Daily Worker from 1947 to January 10, 1958, reached the rank of lieutenant colonel as a volunteer in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade during the Spanish Civil War...
...Agronsky: When did you first read it...
...I remember rising to speak...
...I can give a tremendous list...
...Wait...
...One was The God That Failed...
...The party returned to discredited policies which were to result in its ruin...
...Fast has been through a purgatory of his own...
...It said that Communists had no monopoly on socialism and would join with other socialist-minded people to form a united party of socialism...
...Agronsky: But then, so many of them were disillusioned—Ignazio Si-lone, Stephen Spender, Andre Gide— all of them left in 1939...
...Fast...
...Fast, with blinkers, self-imposed...
...These young people knew nothing of what I took for granted...
...This was not a case of dictation from abroad...
...We all wear a set of blinkers...
...I would say that the Communist Party is not a thing to be feared, yet it cannot be destroyed by any force or any violence...
...After 27 years of dogmatic adherence to the Communist Party, I do not profess to have the answers...
...Two: I went on living...
...For instance, the Communist Party, led by the Soviet Union, interdicted Freud, psychoanalysis, mental health—the whole science of the mind...
...If American Communists have been blinded by admiration, other socialists have been blinded by hate...
...Relations with other Communist parties and the socialistic countries were to be friendly but must include the right of frank criticism where necessary...
...it also made us eager to accept the word of Soviet Communists as the final say on our own problems...
...Fast: Ever since 1933—believed it and disbelieved it...
...A wave of laughter flooded McMillan Theater, swept through every corner of the hall...
...two who turned THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM IN AMERICA by JOHN GATES Tn the 27 years since I joined the Communist Party, my ideas of how socialism will be attained in the United States and what it will be like have undergone considerable change...
...Fast: I would say to them, don't wipe this out, and don't dismiss this as lies and slanders...
...And in some respects, we were...
...Today nuclear energy has provided mankind with the means not only of complete liberation, but also of complete extinction...
...The program had been publicly formulated some six months before the convention, when the organization was reeling under the impact of the startling events abroad...
...Thousands of members left during this time, some after the Khrushchev revelations, some because of the Jewish question, some because of Poland and Hungary, some because they could not stand the atmosphere of name-calling and personal abuse that was rampant, and still others because they had no confidence in the leadership and in the ability of the Party to carry through the changes agreed upon...
...There was a vacuum which we attempted to fill...
...You've left a faith, after 13 years, that you believed in devoutly...
...It was not until 1956, however, that it burst out into the open...
...Fast: Well, in 1943 we were in a war against Fascism...
...Fast: Unless if it became its opposite-—which I see no hope of...
...But in the case of the Communist Party, there is no doubt that its peculiar relationship with the Soviet Communists had a decisive bearing on the primary question, on its inability to work out proper theories and organizational forms and to face sudden and unexpected shifts of an international nature...
...The old "monolithic" and super-centralized character of the Party was modified to establish the right of dissent and the protection of minority views...
...You too...
...You obviously distilled a number of fresh ideas about the Party since your break...
...In a new effort to become a movement more in tune with reality, the Party reversed in 1945 when a single Communist leader abroad, Jacques Duclos, wrote a single article...
...America needs a mass radical movement...
...And I could never have imagined then a scene at the New York State convention of the Communist Party, one year ago, when a young woman, veteran of the student movement days, got up to say: "I loved the Johnny Gates who fought in Spain, but I hate the Johnny Gates who has taken the same position on Hungary as Franco...
...Fast: —an anti-Communist...
...My financial condition is far worse now— Agronsky: All right...
...secondly, because radicalism is a more embracing concept than socialism...
...And total proof came for me entirely at the moment when the general secretary, the nominal head of the whole Communist movement on earth—this is not in fact but in a manner of speaking— and the actual head of the Soviet Union's Communist Party delivered a secret report in which he not only swore upon his oath that every slander and accusation made in 20 years against the Soviet Union was true, but in addition to that dragged out a series of crimes, a record of terror, of bestiality, of bloody murder and torture that even the worst enemies of Communism had never thought of...
...They could not tolerate the Daily Worker editorials which spoke the truth as many of its editors and staff, not only myself, saw it...
...They call you a slanderer...
...Fast: Of course I did...
...Explain this to me...
...You submit to an arrogant, stupid, Victorian dictatorship of thoughts, ideas, and so forth...
...Most former Communists reached this conclusion before I did...
...Its independent policy was weakened...
...There's no occasion, certainly...
...You would have to ask it of Sean O'Casey, of Louis Aragon, of Paul Eluard...
...It may persist for a time like other radical sects in American history, but only as a living corpse...
...It has hit me hard...
...The fault, I believe, lies not with the people, but with the socialist movements...
...Agronsky: Let us understand this in the area beyond your own personal experience, Mr...
...Fast: All right...
...This is the truth...
...The horror of our times is that every one does...
...tyrannies can arise in planned societies...
...Fast: Total proof...
...Now, let me go on a minute with that...
...Fast: It works, in the main sense, as our censorship works...
...In this book that I've written [The Naked God], I say that every man and woman who joins the Communist Party begins to leave it the moment they join it...
...Bitterness and recrimination increased...
...Fast...
...Most important was the statement of a new attitude to Communists abroad...
...I cried out: "For the first time in all my years in the Party, I feel ashamed of the name, 'Communist.'" My colleagues sat with frozen faces...
...Gates was a member of the national committee of the Communist Party for more than a decade...
...I will never get it...
...Fast: It's not for nothing that the phase of history we are going through now has been termed by some people, perhaps not too correctly, the Writer's Revolution...
...Fast: No, I don't think so...
...Not entirely physical...
...And you, Mr...
...In this atmosphere, the Daily Worker became the chief target of the opponents of the convention policy...
...The new convention program was a dead letter almost from the moment of adoption...
...Fast: —in American exchange, this is a half million dollars...
...You must accept the fact that there were deep reasons why I refused to see...
...The changes were so fundamental that if carried out, the Communist Party would no longer be a Communist Party in the traditional sense, but something altogether different...
...But my conviction that socialism is the next higher stage in the progress of America remains unchanged...
...Fast: You can't call it spiritual...
...Here was the triumph of hate over that love of man that had sent us all to Spain...
...But, I have coming to me, on deposit in the Soviet Union two million rubles— Agronsky: Can you get it...
...And—three— [he] conducted no fights for his inalienable rights because he had no inalienable rights...
...The Communist Party says in effect, "When you leave or when we expel you, we will destroy your reputation, your standing, your mortal soul, and all else that you may value here on earth...
...What about the estimated 10,000 American Communists that are left...
...Fast: Well, I paid a much greater price...
...He wrote no more...
...All are out of joint with the American people, although for different reasons...
...This was Ignazio Silone...
...Truth, understanding, and an ability to measure this thing calmly and react in a democratic way—this will destroy it...
...Gates' polemical comments on the extent to which the Communists contributed to the social gains of the Thirties—but we believe that both have told absorbing and revealing stories of service in, and break with, the Communist Party...
...When I read it again, I felt I was looking into a mirror...
...Fast: Many years ago...
...The third attempt to change the Party began with many rumblings as far back as six years ago...
...I had my blinkers, other people had their blinkers...
...They led me...
...This is a hard thing to understand because many spend a lifetime and they never leave it...
...The history of writers is intertwined like threads, like the whole history of the Communist movement of our time...
...This we can accept...
...There was a gulf of generations between us...
...Today, in spite of tremendous progress in the struggle for equal citizenship, many Southern states are in revolt against the federal government...
...Every socialist movement in America in the final analysis has foundered on this problem, whether blindly pro-Soviet, bitterly anti-Soviet, or where it existed before the Soviet Union had even come into being...
...When I joined, lynch rule was the favored instrument for wringing super-profits out of the South...
...There are no lies, there are no slanders in anything (Continued from Page 34) I started to answer, as so many Communist speakers do, beginning with the long, bitter fight for social insurance, the payments to the aged and the unemployed on which so many depend today...
...You see what I have done today...
...Certain people who have a very deep devotion to these ideals become convinced and became convinced...
...Fast, and you have been writing for many years...
...I ask only that those who were never connected with the Communist movement try to understand those of us who were with that degree of objectivity that comes with a sense of one's own fallibility...
...You would have to ask this question of Theodore Dreiser, our greatest contemporary novelist who willingly and openly joined the Communist Party a year before his death...
...My royalties from Europe and Eastern Europe have always been adequate...
...Into that gulf so much work, so much heartache, and sacrifice of the "best years of our lives" had disappeared with hardly a nod of recognition...
...Everyone does...
...Today I am publicly in the view of millions of people— Agronsky: Yes...
...Fast: No, I didn't accept it...
...By its full support for the war against the Axis, the Party recaptured some of its lost prestige...
...I would answer that in part by telling you the story of John Gates—who [was] editor of the Daily Worker...
...I want only, in our conversation, to try to understand you, and through you to try to understand American writers who have joined the Communist Party...
...Fast...
...Fast, you've concerned yourself with what you can distill from your experience for Americans...
...Now, what I have done today, I do on the testimony of the Soviet leadership...
...During the last two years, when the Party crisis assumed its most severe form, 10,000 of its 17,000 members departed—more than half the total membership...
...You wore them voluntarily, you could not break loose...
...when Soviet policy for collective security to halt Hitler contrasted so strongly with the appeasement policies of London, Paris, and many circles here...
...Agronsky: This is how you saw the light, Mr...
...It's a horrible, medieval, magical fear...
...How do you feel, Mr...
...While critical of the failure of these countries to achieve political democracy, American socialists should encourage every trend in that direction, and work for the kind of international climate and peaceful competition which will permit greater progress not only in the Communist countries but in our own as well...
...But don't look at my— Agronsky: Yes...
...I was moving and everyone I knew was moving...
...They all require a good look at themselves, their theories and programs, and need to make big changes to help bring about a mass American socialist movement...
...It was in this phase of the anti-Fascist struggle that writers the world over felt that the only way they could struggle, with more than words, against Fascism was through the Communist Party...
...The Communist Party feeds and grows on force and violence...
...The first time I read it, I read it in one way...
...Did you not go through life, Mr...
...But, at the same time, I have witnessed the process for many years, myself, and I know that this in effect is a powerful weapon of the Communist Party...
...What kind of fear, Mr...
...It was this feeling...
...You would have to ask it of George Bernard Shaw who was also sole support of the London Daily Worker, and to an extent the Communist movement...
...They call you renegade...
...Now, in Russia, a land I supported, this is true by information which is unquestionable: the writer in Russia did not go on writing when he did not write to fit the needs and desires of the Communist Party of Russia...
...Three: I continued to fight with all my strength for what I considered my inalienable rights as an American citizen...
...You asked why I didn't see...
...We reckon there are some 10,000 Communists...
...It's not true today, but at a certain period in the history of modern times, during the great struggles against Nazism and Fascism, millions of people on earth became convinced that only through the Communist Party could these goals be reached or achieved...
...Mr...
...You used the phrase "I refused to see...
...This Soviet intervention in Hungary, I found myself saying, is a crime, a crime it will take us years to overcome...
...Power can be abused...
...Agronsky: Why, Mr...
...And that, incidentally, has always been the greatest weapon of the Party—this exclusiveness which you begin to believe...
...Agronsky: You feel it wasn't...
...Because in 1939 I broke with all my Communist friends over the Pact with Hitler...
...And now, the Communists libel you...
...If you continue, with this proven evidence available, there's no honor, no decency you can lay claim to...
...Now, very shortly before I left the Party, since you brought this up, Boris Izakov, the head of the foreign department of the Soviet Writers' Union, was here, in this country, with Boris Pelavoi...
...But this was not to be...
...None of us would ever be the same again, nor could we continue for long to live in the same movement...
...How does this happen...
...Nothing succeeds like success—and the undisputed success of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union not only blinded us to its errors and crimes...
...It's not my function to criticize you...
...I still don't see it...
...What a wonderful world this would be if we had the ability to see, to look around us, to practice some sort of broad understanding and tolerance...
...Did you read 1984...
...Agronsky: And believed it...
...Agronsky: You can go on with your list, Mr...
...Fast: All these writers, with very few exceptions, who have come into the Communist Party, are people who have been deeply concerned with freedom, with man's personal dignity, and with man's struggle against oppression...
...Fast: You can tolerate a lot...
...I don't come here, really, to sit in a seat of judgment...
...This is one of the great paradoxes of our time and I wish— Agronsky: It's not easy to make me understand it...
...And this is a paradox and it is the tragedy of our time...
...In 1941 I thought otherwise...
...I was blacklisted and yet I went on writing and I published my own books...
...Agronsky: Let me ask you this, Mr...
...The post-Stalin revelations—and revolutions—superimposed on a total isolation resulting from a lifetime of mistakes, caused an unprecedented crisis in the American Communist Party...
...How could you, as a writer, and especially as a writer who concerned himself throughout his career with the subject of freedom, come to join the Communist Party, to accept a totalitarian discipline...
...They lie in Spanish earth...
...I use the term "radical" advisedly—first, because we need to get closer to the root of matters...
...We were convinced we were filling it better than anyone else...
...Twenty seven years ago, war clouds hung over the Far East and over Europe...
...Fast: No, I never had that problem...
...Who does not remember how spendidly the Communists fought for that...
...It had taken over Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Poland...
...What made the issues finally inescapable were the aftermath of the death of Stalin, the revelations by the Soviet leaders themselves, the upheavals in several Communist-governed countries, and in every Communist Party...
...Agronsky: Total proof...
...This is a special suffering of my own, and this is something I can meet and I will get over...
...Fast, we accept that you wore the blinkers...
...The press generally reported this new program as a "declaration of independence" from Moscow...
...By the time of the convention the thaw that had begun in the Communist world was beginning to freeze over again, especially after Hungary...
...We will destroy it for your lifetime, for your children's lifetime, and for generations to come...
...Fast, in the sense of how a writer who writes about freedom and who deeply believes in freedom can subject himself to totalitarian Communist discipline...
...Agronsky: And the price of freedom and the price of writing the truth in the Soviet Union, you now come to the conclusion, is death, and in the United States a man can express his feelings...
...Agronsky: That you could have been a Communist...
...It was conceived from abroad, based on principles devised by Lenin in 1902, and modeled after the only successful party of socialism up to that time, the Communist Party of the Soviet Union...
...The recent Hungarian revolt was sparked and led initially by writers...
...To what discipline did you have to submit, and how could you tolerate it...
...But what I cannot understand, and find so difficult to accept is how you as a writer—a man who must see the world in the round—how in the world could you walk through life, as you did, with blinkers on and not see...
...Fast, the documentation—I repeat again—I do not intend to indict...
...Fast: Well, then you would have to address the same question to literally hundreds of the most notable writers of our time...
...For the American Communists, as for every other American socialist movement over the years, the main and most difficult question has been that of working out a fruitful relationship with the trade union movement and with various non-socialist but radical movements of the people...
...Fast...
...it lost the confidence of both those who had welcomed its bold new approach and those who had always opposed it...
...Is that it...
...I was fighting, I was struggling...
...Fast: Well, I would say this to them, [that] we have a precious thing here and to cherish it and make it a little better...
...Had I been part of such hate...
...THE FAILURE OF COMMUNISM IN AMERICA by JOHN GATES The other side of the picture is that whatever progress we made, even at our best, was severely limited by certain fatal defects from which we suffered and from which we could never completely free ourselves...
...But it's true...
...Fast...
...What I am most curious about is, how is it that you as a writer whose whole theme throughout all of his writings has been freedom—who worships, literally, freedom—how is it that you could have joined the Communist Party as you did...
...The second major try at changing the Party came in 1941 with the attack upon the Soviet Union and Pearl Harbor...
...You recognize that...
...You begin to leave the moment you've joined, and yet years and years go by and you don't leave it, and very often are willing to die in support of it...
...Fast: Yes...
...Army after Pearl Harbor, served in the Aleutians and Germany, and was honorably discharged as a paratrooper first sergeant...
...Then, we had George Orwell's 1984...
...Fast: No...
...Fast, and I will refer to a phrase that you used...
...Agronsky: How does it work...
...I will admit that for years I pondered over the case of Silone, the proof of Silone...
...Can it ever redeem mankind...
...They saw the monster of Communism...
...Gates," one young man shouted in the question period, "you say the Communist Party did big things for America...
...But for a third time we failed...
...My novel Spartacus—no commercial publisher in our country would publish because I was marked as a Communist...
...Earl Browder, under whose leadership the Party had made its greatest advances, was kicked out...
...The book stores were unwilling to sell it...
...I have no more faith today in capitalism as a final answer for the American people than I had 27 years ago...
...I do not mean by what I have said thus far that our relationship with the Soviet Communists was the primary question...
...No, it's out of the question...
...But when people who are a part of our democratic society insisted the things that the Russians were doing were not the promotion of freedom but the repression of it, when you saw the Russians do what they did, how could you still believe they stood for freedom...
...I am in no haste to join or form something new...
...Agronsky: Mr...
...and during the Red Army's great contribution to the defeat of Hitler...
...Fast...
...Agronsky: It tells him what not to write, and you accepted their telling you what not to write...
...It was a voluntary relationship, compounded of an uncritical admiration for our brothers abroad and a lack of confidence in ourselves...
...He served a five year sentence, under the Srruth Act, in the Atlanta penitentiary—The Editors...
...Paralysis and stagnation set in...
...In fact, what the convention did was remarkable, almost revolutionary for a Communist party...
...I said Khrushchev almost created catastrophe by trying to unseat Wladislaw Gomulka in Poland, that Gomulka had saved socialism in Poland, and, instead of being threatened, should have been supported...
...Agronsky: All right, Mr...
...Let's then update you, really, to the present...
...They call you a capitalist beast, as it were...
...One: Writing has been made very difficult for me...
...The world was in upheaval, and members of the Party's national committee were debating their views on Hungary and Poland...
...Fast: He felt, at the time he spoke to me, that the money would be obtainable in the near future...
...They call you a liar...
...The first major attempt to change the Communist Party began in 1934 and was marked by an attempt to forge close relations with the New Deal and the CIO...
...Fast: Wait...
...In October, 1956, Soviet troops had started shooting in Budapest, then ceased, and were supposed to be pulling out...
...The cry for change found expression in the program adopted by the national convention of the Party in February 1957...
...Therefore, the Communist writer came to understand that he must eschew these things...
...It created a movement for change far more drastic than had ever occurred before...
...This is a terror weapon...
...He volunteered for the U.S...
...Silone himself was willing to work closely with the Italian Communist leader, Togliatti, and there was an enormous respect between these two men in the postwar years...
...THE ONLY HONORABLE THING A COMMUNIST CAN DO' HOWARD FAST interviewed by MARTIN AGRONSKY Agronsky: Howard Fast, I'm a guest in your house...
...Fast: Yes...
...Other writers did not accept it...
...Howard Fast's story is told in the form of an interview with Martin Agronsky, distinguished NBC radio and television commentator, on the tatter's fine Sunday afternoon TV program, "Look Here...
...It is a force weapon...
...Fast: The Communist Party is a pseudo-religious organization...
...The terror which it exercises where it has power with the punishment of execution, with the punishment of torture and death as we saw in Russia, is exercised in countries where the Party is not in power with a form of ex-communication...
...A revitalized socialist movement must not only clarify its relations with the broader movements of the workers and others...
...Fast, did you, perhaps, leave the Communist Party because you felt you could no longer make a living if labeled a Communist...
...During the past two years we succeeded in generating the most far-reaching struggle for change the Party has ever known...
...Fast...
...Fast: No, that I could have gone on year after year, accepting these things...
...When I joined the Communist Party in 1931, there were some 14 million unemployed in the country...
...In this book that you've written explaining why you left the Party and in which you described how you finally made your break, I think you wrote "in the end there is fear...
...It could never have entered my head in those days to be ashamed of the name "Communist...
...For it also brought us considerable prestige—particularly in the Thirties, when the planned economy and absence of unemployment in the Soviet Union contrasted sharply with conditions here at home...
...Did you read The God That Failed...
...I don't boast about it, but I am the most widely read author of this century...
...Let us look at what Communism had done by this time...
...I spoke to him and he offered me his opinion...
...Agronsky: Yes...
...What were they...
...You find yourself trapped in believing and then are unable to shake loose from— Agronsky: All right, Mr...
...I am convinced now that the Party cannot be changed from within and that the fight to do so is hopeless...
...People are made that way...
...It works through the application of the censorship by the writer himself, because he knows the punishment that will follow his violating the decrees of censorship...
...I worked with the Party in the popular movements that ushered in the system of unemployment and social insurance, the formation of industrial unions, the nation-wide campaigns for Negro rights, and the I've said today...
...And so— Agronsky: Still, you accepted it, Mr...
...It hit me hardest one afternoon, just a year ago, when 1,200 students on the Columbia University campus came to hear me speak...
...It's a terrible fear, and yet it's a fear that they have implanted in millions of the very best, the most honest, the most dedicated human beings on earth...
...And, I'm inclined to think that they would be...
...Fast: I feel rotten...
...The very concept of the Communist Party was something that clashed with American life...
...No one who has contributed to progress has been free of mistakes...
...Fast, thank you for this very moving exposition of your belief...
...There are 168 million Americans...
...Let me say this...
...Agronsky: They believed they were fighting and dying for Spanish freedom, Mr...
...Something sacred in my own life was unknown to them...
...We do not concur in some of the judgments expressed—chiefly Mr...
...Agronsky: But you only left last year, Mr...
...Fast, you didn't even join until 1943, and you didn't leave until last year...
...You say the documentation was lacking...
...These are people who have been my friends and associates—comrades —for years...
...My face flushed, as though something had hit me...
...What would you say to them...
...And yet, in 1943 you came to the Communist Party...
...and eternal vigilance is the price of liberty for socialism too...
...Fast: You believed they stood for freedom because you rested on the fact that total proof was lacking...
...Political democracy does not come automatically with the transfer of production from private to public ownership—a fact which I and many others were late in appreciating...
...But in the Thirties we made progress toward transforming the Party into an indigenous American socialist movement...
...Agronsky: And you accept that without question...
...It must also reexamine its relations with the Communist-led countries...
...If the Communists in the United States have failed, so have all other socialist movements here...
...I had reached the reluctant conclusion not only that the Party was no longer an effective channel for these ideals, but that it could not become so without a radical transformation, and that such a change was impossible...
...That's the answer as to how you can tolerate it...
...Fast: It doesn't tell him what to write...
...Agronsky: There really seems no hope for that...
...Agronsky: But you do not answer me, Mr...
...Fast: It's a non-spiritual feeling...
...Fast: They believed they were fighting and dying, not only for Spanish freedom, but for man's freedom...
...Fast, so many other people with the same concern as yours in freedom saw a third monster...
...Fast: Well, I say three things...
...Fast: It's—it's—it's— Agronsky: You don't fear assassination...
...This is a question of movements, of beliefs, of disbeliefs, of accusations, of lies, of slanders...
...effort to achieve collective security against Fascism, dramatized by the 3,000 Americans, most of them Communists and I among them, who volunteered to fight against Fascism in Spain...
...I saw the whole world joining with Russia in an anti-Fascist struggle...
...A new attitude toward trade unions and other organizations was outlined, disclaiming any desire to impose Communist policies upon them...
...And now, suddenly, these are the names that are applied to me...
...Perhaps some of them are listening to us today...
...Fast: —life in the Communist Party as a bed of roses...
...Fast...
...I've turned on the Communist Party, bluntly and frankly...
...Democracy is very imperfect, and yet, with its imperfections it's marvelous...
...Fast: I think it demonstrated it to some...
...What was it like, as a writer in the Communist Party...
...I paid a much greater price for the years that I spent in the Party...
...Fast: No, you don't accept it without question...
...Fast: I say that this should not exist any longer...
...The Communists, in spite of serious mistakes and ultimate failure, did make some contribution to America...
...The prestige which the Party gained in some labor and intellectual quarters in the following five years was wiped out practically overnight when the Soviet Union and Germany signed a non-aggression pact in August, 1939, and the Party abandoned its policy of unity against Hitlerism...
...They have told the world what the basis is that makes it impossible for any honest or decent human being to be a member of this organization...
...This thought has come late...
...It can be said that the whole history of the Party from its birth in 1919 had built up to this climax...
...Fast, about the possibility of achieving what a man who believes in freedom wants to achieve in the democratic system...
...At every crisis, we found ourselves unable to stand on our own feet...
...Fast: It's a perfectly natural feeling...
...Many will say that 27 years was a mighty long time to reach such an obvious conclusion...
...So I did not do it for a financial gain...
...Young Lardner, a son of Ring Lardner, an American writer, died fighting in Spain with many other American writers...
...I did not come to Communism in 1943 as a stranger...
...I rode the subways home that night in grim bewilderment: I can still hear that laughter...
...This will leave it out of our scene, and it doesn't belong in this scene anymore...
...Several years ago, if I had done the same thing, the Communist Party would have crucified me as it crucified so many others who then either were compelled by their own inner drives or forces, or else had the courage, to leave this movement...
...Obviously, I did not lead the majority out of the party...
...The evidence is available to you...
...Of course I didn't walk through life— Agronsky: Mr...
...Continued on Page 38) The Progressive presents here the stories of two of America's leading Communists who broke with their Party in recent months—John Gates, editor for a decade of the now defunct Daily Worker, and Howard Fast, world famous novelist...
...The leadership elected, however, was more representative of the sectarian trend which remained in the Party, and this, in turn, accelerated the disintegration of the organization...
...Agronsky: And what would you say, Mr...
...Consequently the convention program was the fruit of the desires of members who had already left the Party or were in the process of doing so...
...The suspension of the Daily Worker was the final dramatic proof that the Communist Party has ceased to exist for all practical purposes...
...When I left, there were—in spite of the highest living standards and government spending ever known— more than four million unemployed...
...Two: He did not go on living...
...By 1943 I felt that the next step, here, to effectively struggle as well as write against this monster that was threatening to consume the earth—of Hitlerism, of Fascism—was to join the Communist Party...
...I do, however, have some tentative ideas to offer...
...This is of importance to me and my family...
...You cannot leave the Communist Party and remain a decent human being...
...I had been close to this, known Communists, been affected by Communists, read Communist literature...
...In the Forties we made another try, again with considerable if short-lived success...
...It was the struggles and the glories of the Thirties that made me—not to mention thousands of others— "stay in...
...There is no living author in the whole world whose books have sold the quantity that mine have...
...Agronsky: Mr...
...You have written that for some years now publishers have refused to publish your works, that you were forced to publish them yourself...
...Actually, our relationship with the Soviet Communists was two-edged...
...You fight against it, you twist, you turn...
...What, from your experience in the Communist Party, would you say, first, to those Americans...
Vol. 22 • March 1958 • No. 3
