Ruby Bates was a remarkable woman. Underneath it all—the poverty, the degradation—she was decent, pure. Here was an illiterate white girl, all of whose training had been clouded by the myths of white supremacy, who, in the struggle for the lives of these nine innocent boys, had come to see the role she was being forced to play. As a murderer. She turned against her oppressors…. I shall never forget her.
Max Shachtman
Formerly a Trotskyite leader, now a leading theoretician of the American Socialist Party.
UNTIL THE CRASH OCCURRED, it was thought there was something unique about American capitalism. Even the radicals felt it. They were in bad shape. The Communists were wracked by internal strife. The Socialists were stagnating. Ford was paying his workers $5 a day—unprecedentedly
high wages. It seemed the class struggle was coming to an end, and radicalism might disappear. But the 1929 crisis created a revolution in thought: it affected liberals and, in many cases, conservatives, as well as radicals.
What was called the collapse of American capitalism had an enormously stimulating effect on the American Communist Party. It underwent two phases in the Thirties: the first five years of the decade; and the second. This phenomenon had something of a third phase, too.
At the beginning, it purged itself. It has nothing to do with events in the United States. As always, in the case of the Communists, it reflected happenings in Russia. On the eve of “the collapse of American capitalism,” the CP expelled a group of us for espousing “the counter-revolutionary policies of Trotsky.” Other expulsions followed. The conflict resulted in at least a dozen different factions. This bewilderment kept the Party in a state of paralysis.
However, the oncoming of mass unemployment, on a scale hitherto unknown in this country, enabled the Communists to organize the unemployed and stage vigorous protests. They were initially the leaders of this movement. In New York, at Union Square, they were able to gather as many as 100,000 people at a rally.
Hoover was still President. Since he didn’t offer even the mildest form of amelioration for the unemployed, the Communist Party seemed to be riding high. But its success was illusory. At bottom, the unemployed worker was uninterested in communism. He was interested in one thing only: a job. The CP could involve him in demonstrations, but it couldn’t get him a job. It was the New Deal that subsequently did this—at least, for a few million.
With the election of Roosevelt, the Party entered a new phase. It envisioned the complete decay of capitalism and the impending triumph of international proletarian revolution. It engaged in the most militant policies imaginable. Everybody to the right—and some to the left—of the Party was considered the enemy. Socialists became social fascists. They were more vigorously attacked than the real fascists. During the first New Deal period, Congress was referred to as the fascist Grand Council.
Although it was of transitory nature, Communists were making progress among the unemployed. Unfortunately, they deepened the gulf between themselves and every other radical group in the country. “Red trade unions” were created. Their programs were revolutionary as all get out; their leadership was hot as a pistol. They had only one defect—few members. Consequently, their reputation among trade unions became really bad. There are few crimes as great in labor circles as dual unionism: dividing the ranks of workers in their confrontations with employers.
Nevertheless, capitalism looked pretty sick. Wide segments of the population
were radicalized. In liberal and academic communities, Marxism, which had been considered passé, became popular again. There was more writing about Marxism—favorable, though not very perceptive, in many cases—during these years than at any other time in American history.
In the late Twenties and early Thirties, thousands of young people had joined the Socialist Party. They kept pushing the Socialists further and further to the left, in many instances borrowing the jargon of the Communists. This led to a split. The right wing, many older Socialists, pulled out. Especially after the Detroit Convention of 1934, when a platform was adopted in favor of the dictatorship of the proletariat.
These parallel developments among the Communists and the Socialists were influenced, aside from our domestic crisis, by two events in Europe.
The first: the triumph of fascism in Germany. Hitler had overthrown the Weimar Republic, without any real resistance by the world’s two largest radical parties, outside Russia: the German Communist Party and the Social Democrats. They capitulated without firing a shot. There was conjured up a return to barbarism, in modern form, and the danger of a second world war. This was about 1933.
The second event was the Russian Five Year Plan, inaugurated by Stalin. The world outside knew little of its details. Later, it learned of the horrors associated with it. But what stood out in the minds of ninety-nine out of every hundred of American radicals was this contrast: there was no smoke in American factory chimneys; there, production was going on like mad; everybody was working. And of all the great powers, it was Russia that was intransigently anti-fascist.
Yet in spite of all this, radicalism did not take deep root in the United States. The Communist Party had added a few thousand members, but it was still insignificant in the political life of this country. Especially, when contrasted to the American Socialist Party at its peak in 1918. It had over a hundred thousand members.
It was in the second half of the Thirties that a big change occurred in the American Left. There was the New Deal and especially the birth of the CIO. Labor entered politics, as the unorganized were organized. Radicals of all persuasion were deeply affected. The Communists and the Socialists, because of their experience, were virtually sucked into the movement. In many cases, they were the moving forces.
With the rise of Hitler and the Spanish resistance to fascism in the Civil War, a most decisive event followed. A radical turnabout in Communist policy. The People’s Front—the United Front—came into being. The Party abandoned the theory of “social fascism.” The United Front welcomed all radicals, all liberals and, for that matter, all “right-thinking” capitalists. (Laughs.) Everybody. The New Deal and Roosevelt were embraced. Speeches called for understanding of the National Association of
Manufacturers. Had any radical suggested these ideas in preceding decades, he’d have been politically lynched. There were only two prerequisites: friendliness to Russia and hostility to Hitler.
As far as the Communist Party was concerned, it was quite effective. Certainly, unity among radicals is better than internal strife. It was the party of friendliness. How could anybody oppose it? You’d have to be against motherhood….
Soon, the policy of working in the Democratic Party became accepted. This was natural. The labor movement was overwhelmingly behind Roosevelt and the New Deal. It wasn’t a matter of taking it over. I don’t believe all this right-wing nonsense about their capturing the Democratic Party. It was merely a matter of influence. In comparison with its utter isolation in the first half of the Thirties, this was an enormous advance for the Communists. But it was all an illusion. Its Achilles’ heel was its subordination to Moscow policy.
The Party had been doing fine. It was against fascism, for the Loyalist government in Spain, for the CIO, for all the nice things in the New Deal. What the hell more do you want from a radical party? There’s never been anything as nice as this in American history. (Laughs.) Then, virtually overnight, it destroyed itself. It backed the Hitler-Stalin pact.
The shock was volcanic. The labor movement drove them out of its ranks. It lost liberal support. It was reduced to insignificance. At the end of the decade, the CP appeared far more discredited, far more isolated than at the beginning of the Thirties. And from that, it has never recovered.
There was a burst of respectability with the invasion of Russia by Hitler. Once again, radical and liberal intellectuals flocked to its banner. But it was a brief moment. Then came the Cold War…. Today, even the New Left looks upon it as obsolete, puritanical, conservative, establishment….
It’s funny, if it weren’t so tragic. It’s sad because of its effect on a genuine American radical movement. It looked for a moment, at the beginning, that it might become that. It never did.
The decline of the Socialist Party is even more regrettable. Especially to me. For the past ten years, I’ve been a member. This party did not understand—and now is only beginning to understand—the profound political revolution wrought by Roosevelt and the New Deal.
A new political coalition was created: labor, with its many ethnic minorities and Negroes. At first it was sentiment on the part of the blacks; now it is organized. I’m convinced this coalition is going to remain a decisive element in American politics for a long time to come.
This coalition worked. It did not produce socialism, but then that wasn’t Roosevelt’s intention. (Laughs). He saved our society in a new
bourgeois reform way. I hate to use this jargon, but there you have it. Capitalism remains.
So the Socialist vote continues to decline. The enormous sympathies it once enjoyed in the labor movement has thinned down to nothing. The Communists, because of Moscow, are ruined. The American Left is nothing as compared to its role in European countries. Nothing breaks my heart more than to say this: our stupidity in not recognizing the significance of the coalition, our failure to identify with this group, our isolation from the mainstream of American political thought, our special language, which no one understands. It’s a pity.
I don’t expect our power structure to build a radical movement. I expect the radicals to do that. Up to now, they have failed. As I watch the New Left, I simply weep. If somebody set out to take the errors and stupidities of the Old Left and multiplied them to the nth degree, you would have the New Left of today….
The radicals of the Thirties have gone their separate way. Only a handful retain their old commitments. I feel more strongly about the ideals of socialism than I ever did. Still, many thousands of old radicals, like myself, vote for the goddam Democrats. And yet, as I look back on that decade, the Thirties, it was for radicals the most exciting period in American history.
Dorothy Day
The headquarters of The Catholic Worker: it is on the Lower East Side in New York. On a wall of the kitchen—an all-purpose room of “any peasant’s lodging,” as a young man says—is a framed quotation of Father Daniel Berrigan: “Men are called to declare peace as once they were called to declare war.”
Her room, two fights up, is bare of any luxury. A cot, a couple of chairs, a shelf of well-thumbed books, including a great many paperbacks. There are occasional interruptions by young associates—questions of the moment : the putting up of a stray couple; an unexpected visitor will I share their meal? Nothing fancy, but filling….
She is a large-boned, handsome woman. Though a white-haired grandmother, touching seventy, her demeanor is that of a young, exhilarated girl. An intimation of weariness is now and then reflected. It passes quickly.
“My approach even as a child was religious. Some of my old friends
from the Communist Party felt I was too religious to be really a good revolutionist. Pacifism was very much my whole point of view. I never could see a set of people killing off another set of people to bring a better society. People had to work nonviolently. I don’t think I was especially influenced by Gandhi. I think it’s the whole Christian message.
“My whole background before, as a Socialist and a Communist, was that things should be changed. There’s always going to be human suffering, plain human orneriness. But it seemed impossible to me that we should be living with these extremes of wealth and poverty, where people lived like dogs and got nowhere.”
IN DECEMBER, 1932, I was covering the hunger march, down in Washington, of the Unemployed Councils. And a farmers convention which was more or less Communist-inspired. I went down there to cover it for
Commonweal
and
America.
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I just sat in that shrine and prayed that a way would open up for me to work more directly with these issues. My prayer was obviously a fervent one. That was the year I met Peter Maurin. That was the year
The Catholic Worker
started.
She tells of Peter Maurin, the French peasant, who chose poverty as a way of life; a former teacher, he came to Chicago’s Skid Row; worked the railroads, the wheat fields, the steel mills; was a janitor; engaged in all sorts of manual labor: “the man who digs the ditches, the man who cleans the sewers deserves just as much pay as the man who sits behind the desk….” All reform, he believed, must come from the bottom up, not from the top down. His belief was in a “personalist communitarian revolution.” It begins with the individual and his personal response to poverty….
Ours is more the anarchist’s point of view: the State is a tremendous danger. We were the first ones in the Church to oppose Mussolini and Hitler. We picketed the
Bremen
,
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I remember, down there on the waterfront. The Communists were picketing at the same time. The Communists and the Catholics….
It must have been in 1935. A group of Communists boarded the ship and tore down the swastika. Some of them were arrested, and one was shot. We were, both sides, issuing leaflets. Although atheism is an integral part of Marxism, according to Lenin, we still had these concordances….
We joined them in a protest in front of the police station. We were dispersed by the police. When the Communists who were arrested were brought to trial, they proclaimed themselves Catholic workers. Most of them were longshoremen and they were Catholics, by birth. Cradle Catho-lics.
It was amazing to hear them all get up and say they were Catholic workers. (Laughs.) Right away, they were identified with us. I found it very amusing.