At
a rally in New York City in 1962, the famously liberal journalist
Murray Kempton said to an audience full of old Reds: “I have known many
Communists in my life. I have not known them as criminals. I knew them
once as activists — and we had our quarrels. But while this country has
not been kind to you, it has been fortunate in having you. You have been
arrested, you have been followed, you have had your phones bugged, you
have had your children fired. Throughout this, I can think of numbers of
you I have known who have remained gallant and pleasant and unbroken.”
He added, “I salute you and I hope for times to be better.”
My mother was in the audience that night and said, when she came home: “America was
fortunate to have had the Communists here. They, more than most,
prodded the country into becoming the democracy it always said it was.”
My
parents were working-class socialists. I grew up in the late 1940s and
early ’50s thinking of them and their friends as what they themselves
called “progressives.” The sociology of the progressive world was
complex. At its center were full-time organizers for the Communist
Party, at the periphery left-wing sympathizers, and at various points in
between everything from rank-and-file party card holders to respected
fellow travelers.
In
my childhood, these distinctions did not exist for me. The people who
came to our Bronx apartment or were present at the fund-raising parties
we attended, the rallies we went to, and the May Day parades we marched
in were all simply progressives. At the kitchen table they drank tea,
ate black bread and herring, and talked “issues.” I understood nothing
of what they said, but I was always excited by the richness of their
rhetoric, the intensity of their arguments, the urgency and longing
behind that hot river of words that came pouring ceaselessly from them.
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They
were voyagers on that river, these plumbers, pressers and sewing
machine operators; and they took with them on their journey not only
their own narrow, impoverished experience but also a set of abstractions
with transformative powers. When these people sat down to talk,
Politics sat down with them, Ideas sat down with them; above all,
History sat down with them. They spoke and thought within a context that
lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had
been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as
obligations. They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they
were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian
Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism).
While
it is true that thousands of people joined the Communist Party in those
years because they were members of the hardscrabble working class
(garment district Jews, West Virginia miners, California fruit pickers),
it was even truer that many more thousands in the educated middle class
(teachers, scientists, writers) joined because for them, too, the party
was possessed of a moral authority that lent shape and substance,
through its passion for structure and the eloquence of its rhetoric, to
an urgent sense of social injustice.
Most
Communists never set foot in party headquarters, laid eyes on a Central
Committee member, or were privy to policy-making sessions. But every
rank-and-filer knew that party unionists were crucial to the rise of
industrial labor; party lawyers defended blacks in the South; party
organizers lived, worked, and sometimes died with miners in Appalachia;
farm workers in California; steel workers in Pittsburgh. What made it
all real were the organizations the party built: the International
Workers Order, the National Negro Congress, the Unemployment Councils.
Whenever some new world catastrophe announced itself throughout the
Depression and World War II, The Daily Worker sold out in minutes.
It
is perhaps hard to understand now, but at that time, in this place, the
Marxist vision of world solidarity as translated by the Communist Party
induced in the most ordinary of men and women a sense of one’s own
humanity that ran deep, made life feel large; large and clarified. It
was to this clarity of inner being that so many became not only
attached, but addicted. No reward of life, no love nor fame nor wealth,
could compete with the experience. It was this all-in-allness of world
and self that, all too often, made of the Communists true believers who
could not face up to the police state corruption at the heart of their
faith, even when a 3-year-old could see that it was eating itself alive.
I was 20 years old in February 1956 when Nikita Khrushchev addressed the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party
and revealed to the world the incalculable horror of Stalin’s rule.
Night after night the people at my father’s kitchen table raged or wept
or sat staring into space. I was beside myself with youthful rage.
“Lies!” I screamed at them. “Lies and treachery and murder. And all in
the name of socialism! In the name of socialism!” Confused and
heartbroken, they pleaded with me to wait and see, this couldn’t be the
whole truth, it simply couldn’t be. But it was.
The
20th Congress report brought with it political devastation for the
organized left around the world. Within weeks of its publication, 30,000
people in this country quit the party, and within the year it was as it
had been in its 1919 beginnings: a small sect on the American political
map.
The
effective life of the Communist Party in the United States was
approximately 40 years in length. Hundreds of thousands of Americans
were Communists at one time or another during those 40 years. Many of
these people endured social isolation, financial and professional ruin,
and even imprisonment. They were two generations of Americans whose
lives were formed by political history as were no other American lives
save those of the original Revolutionists. History is in them — and they
are in history.
Correction: May 1, 2017
An earlier version of this essay misstated the month of Nikita Khrushchev’s address to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. It was February 1956, not April.
An earlier version of this essay misstated the month of Nikita Khrushchev’s address to the 20th Congress of the Soviet Communist Party. It was February 1956, not April.
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