Michigan State 1949–50

First thing after stashing my bindle at Howland Co-op in East Lansing and parking my Chevy in the back lot, I dashed off to the Journalism Department on campus to request a transfer of majors. It was only days before fall registration began at MSC, and I was lucky to find department head Professor A. A. Applegate in his office available for consultation. “Triple A” was a genial, approachable chap possibly in his early 60s who made me welcome into the major. I told him about my total literacy in the Finnish language so he took my word for it and waived any further foreign language requirement from me. To graduate I needed forty units in journalism classes plus a few other optional classes in order to be in line for a BA after the fall quarter of 1950. I would need to do a six-week paid internship at a newspaper during the summer of 1950 as a compulsory requirement to graduate. Dr, Applegate was a small town guy and was proud of the small city and town dailies that proliferated in Michigan at that time, so toward the following spring he urged me to line up a summer job at one of them which would also give me extra class credits.

My optional classes included a course called “The Bible as Literature.” As a non-believer I had never read the book but wanted to learn what it was about although I had no fear of being “converted.” Our text would be a special edition of the King James Bible.

I resumed my role in the campus CP politics as well as the AVC and the Co-op. We had several new residents at Howland House and became fast long-haul friends with Jim Sinkule from Mishawaka, Indiana, a WWII vet my age, and a young Jewish engineering student Daniel Davis of New York City whose older married sister was a CP member. Old buds Harry Doehne, Tony Radspieler, and Dick Scott were among hangovers from before. Doctoral candidate Warren Litsky in biology hailed from Fitchburg. Jim Sinkule, Mike Barney from Muskegon and Walt Hartmann from the Detroit area became regular bar hopping drinking buddies.

My main CP assignment was to distribute Michigan Sunday Workers in Lansing’s black neighborhood in the western side of the city. As a discriminated-against people I guess it was thought we would be more readily received in the black community than white of whom the temper of the times would likely make more hostile and anti-Communist. So every Sunday afternoon I’d walk the West Lansing neighborhoods dropping papers off at doorsteps hoping to get involved in conversations and even picking up occasional subscriptions with more luck than I had with the Italian IWO members the past spring in Lorain.

PURGE AT AVC NATIONAL CONVENTION

Our AVC Chapter at Michigan State received some dramatic news that a purge of Communists would take place at the AVC National Convention in Cleveland this Fall. I was elected delegate to represent our chapter there.

For an overview of the AVC and its history, I’ll start with a brief summary from the American Veterans Committee Wikipedia article. AVC was founded in 1943 by a nucleus of WWII vets as a liberal veterans group. It was an alternative to the politically and socially conservative American Legion and Veterans of Foreign Wars. With the USA’s New Deal legacy and military victory against the fascist Axis powers, initially it had much popular support, reaching its peak membership of 100,000 in 1947 of servicemen and women. It was also open to Merchant Marine vets who had no military status and who were denied WWII GI benefits. There were also many thousands of CP members who had served in the war and wanted to join a veterans organization and according to Wikipedia they initially tried to affiliate with the American Legion but were summarily rebuffed. (Why they would want to join such a super-patriotic right wing group is beyond me.) Initially dismissing AVC as a bunch of Ivy Leaguers, the CP then urged its veteran members to sign up with AVC. Which they did in large numbers. This pushed the panic button for the liberal and social democratic vets who were its founders and the factional battles were on. The anti-CP liberals who were always the majority then moved to purge the pro-communists who they feared were trying to capture the organization. The infighting was vicious, though we never faced any of that in our politically diverse MSC chapter, and by 1948 the national membership had declined alarmingly to 20,000! I suspect that most of those who left were not part of either faction but were sickened by the infighting and wanted no part of it. So this was the state of affairs when I drove to Cleveland where the convention was held at the Hotel Hollenden.

CIVIL WAR AMONG VETS

As soon as I checked into the hotel and registered for the convention I

contacted the “Progressive Caucus” opposing any purge. Actually the majority of the members of my MSC chapter weren’t Party members although we controlled its executive committee, so my alignment naturally went to this convention caucus. The liberal establishment strategy was to target CP NC member John Gates, a Daily Worker staffer and Spanish Civil War as well as US WWII vet for expulsion and if successful, the rest of the CP members would follow — the same strategy the Socialist Party had used to expel IWW leader Big Bill Haywood in 1914 for allegedly advocating “industrial violence” and “sabotage” with the rank and file Wobblies who were SP members followed him, dropping out in disgust. Gates (1913–1992) was also one of the top eleven CP members out on bail for the Smith Act violations for “advocating the overthrow of the US Government through force and violence.”

The establishment caucus was made up of anti-communist ADA-style liberals and Social Democrats (including some Socialist Party members whom I got to know a few years later.) There was a large contingent of Reuther Caucus UAW members, some of them representing Detroit Area AVC auto worker paper chapters allegedly formed hurriedly to enable them to send delegates to “throw out the commies.” There was also a smaller centrist “Build AVC Caucus,” led by magazine publisher and novelist Michael Straight which pursued a Rodney King line of: “Why can’t we all get along?” (Remember King, a drunken motorist in a Southern CA county who was beaten by cops in an all white town, and when the cops were left free after their trial by the judge, a wholesale rebellion broke out in the urban LA black community.)

AUGUST (GUS) TYLER

The effective floor leader of the “Dump Gates” side was a long time YPSL soapboxer, debater and writer, August (Gus) Tyler (1911–2011), son of immigrant Jewish Daily Forward social democratic stalwarts. In the late 1930s he was leader of the “revolutionary socialist” Clarity Caucus of the Socialist Party. He was a fearful and

effective opponent of the YCL during his stormy YPSL days. A later Typo Union brother once told me that the NY CP had severely warned its YCLers not to publicly debate Gus Tyler as he was too formidable on the stage, since he was clever, smart, and able to twist around his opponents’ arguments in his attacks and rebuttals. In other words, he could wipe the floor with Browder’s young charges in debates. At the time of the AVC Convention he was top assistant to David Dubinsky, strongly anti-Communist right wing social democratic president of the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, which the CP loved to hate. Tyler proved his muscular verbal talents on the floor of the convention, and despite being factionally part of his opposition I couldn’t help but secretly admire him. After routing one of Gates’ supporters with his debating skills, Tyler faced the audience and sneered disdainfully: “And this guy calls himself a lawyer!” Great theatre!

One tactic the dominant caucus used effectively was to have James Kutcher, a legless WWII veteran who was a member of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party sit on the stage in his wheelchair through every session of the meeting to infuriate the CPers as a political blood enemy. All they could do was glare. Speaker after speaker referred to the CPers as “East Wingers” not to be confused with “Left.” The Progressive Caucus also had some capable speakers who put up a spirited defense but it was obviously outclassed. Meantime, “Build AVCer” Michael Straight would plaintively cry out: “Let’s all be nice now.” John Gates, sitting toward the back, was silent through the whole ordeal.

WE MEET WITH JOHN GATES

The evening before the next day’s final and fateful session, a couple of dozen of us met in John Gates’s room. He was calm and relaxed during the informal discussion although he realized defeat was at hand. I can’t remember exactly what he said any more, but the sense was: “We may lose a battle but the struggle continues.” What else could he say?

Next day as I drove out of Cleveland I realized I had witnessed the explosive kind of factional warfare that went on within the movement in highly radicalized cities like New York where Communists, Trotskyists, Socialists, and Anarchists regularly duked it out all the time in what was for them a blood sport they readily thrived on. This was what turned on some people but seeing it for real was an eye-opener for me. I was glad to be returning to the serener climes of East Lansing.

JOHN GATES POSTSCRIPT

It was not a happy afterglow for John Gates. The same year 1949 he and most of the CP’s 11 Smith Act defendants began to serve their five year sentences in Federal penitentiaries, John Gates at Atlanta, where Eugene Debs had been due to his antiwar Canton speech during WW1. When he was released in 1955 he returned to New York as executive editor of the Daily Worker. But in 1956 the Khrushchev Revelations were published which along with the Hungarian Revolution caused a huge turmoil in the CP which lost thousands of shocked members. Gates was one of them but tried to stay on to rally others to “reform” and democratize the Party, with little success. So he resigned in 1958 after 29 years a member. So who was going to hire him, a jailbird and now a pariah in the CP? For openers he wrote his autobiography The Story of an American Communist {Thomas Nelson and Sons 1958) with an introduction by another renegade, the expelled former Party general secretary Earl Browder! Gates claimed that the CP “had ceased to be an effective force for peace, democracy and socialism in the United States.” Really now, but how was it really such a force when it served as an obedient servant for Soviet totalitarianism from its beginnings? He now completely agreed with Browder’s wartime thesis that the Party should abandon its class struggle line in which Communism and Capitalism could live harmoniously side by side in a postwar world. Trotskyist Joseph Hansen reviewed the book and said Gates really wasn’t much of a Marxist and said he should have read Trotsky to really understand what transpired in the Soviet Union. (The Hansen review appears in Google under the John Gates entry.)

But Gates needed a more reliable pay check since his bio wasn’t a best seller that would bring in sufficient royalties. So who would provide him a paying job? Why, his old enemy, the ILGWU under Old Guard social democrat David Dubinsky as president and Gates’s nemesis of 1949, Dubinsky’s Assistant President Gus Tyler at the AVC Convention! He ended up as a researcher for the Union for the rest of his working life investigating worker’s compensation and unemployment insurance claims and the like. Gates died in retirement in Florida at age 78. Such are the ironies of left politics.

FALL WRAP-UP AT MSC

Following the AVC disaster at Cleveland interest in our MSC chapter rapidly fell off with poor attendance at our meetings. Recruitment fell off, some of our lead members had graduated and general demoralization prevailed. I gradually dropped out and the chapter lingered on for another year and died. Since the Wallace defeat the same fate befell the campus Progressive Party club. A young freshman from Illinois Stanton Tefft became club president but couldn’t pump new life into it and it, too, eventually faded away. CP activity continued but the jailing of the Perty’s top leaders brought about an atmosphere of gloom over the club with the pressures of government repression intensifying around the country. There was sporadic signature gathering for the then international Stockholm Peace Petition without much spark. I continued my Sunday Worker paper route in Lansing. I did end up with excellent fall quarter grades and went East to Fitchburg for the holidays, picking up a few bucks at my hometown post office with the seasonal rush.

Winter, Spring Quarters, 1950

Signed up for a raft of required journalism classes along with extras in social and abnormal psychology. Began dating the sister of one of my Lansing area comrades, who had progressive ideas but wasn’t a political joiner and was a grad student in biology. My fellow co-op housemates Harry Doehne and Tony Radspieler had drifted away from campus Progressive Party politics to attend meetings of the local Americans for Democratic Action branch (ADA) which met at the Lansing home of Dr. Harold Ulrey, an agricultural economics professor on campus, one of whose classes I ended up taking. Harry and Tony told me a foreign Finnish student attended these ADA meetings and invited me to come to one so I could meet her and talk Finnish with her. So I drove with them to the meeting where the conversation centered around current political issues from a liberal standpoint. I did talk with the Finnish student who was still upset and in tears over the Finnish-Russian War which had ended in 1944. I had brushed aside concerns over those wars since my indoctrination into Stalinism but was and still am critical over the role the Finns played in the Continuation War (1941–1944) when they were allied with Nazi Germany in the latter’s efforts to conquer Russia. But this young woman’s tearful unhappiness did stir up some compassion for her inasmuch I didn’t believe fascist sympathies were that general among ordinary Finnish working people.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

I never did tell anyone in the CP of my visit to the ADA gathering as its members were liberal anti-communists and I wanted to avoid problems with my comrades about my heretical act. The only way the CP would have approved such a visit if they were io send me to penetrate the ADA as a spy. This is something I would have resisted doing as I’d have been a lousy undercover spy and it wasn’t in my nature to play a two-faced role. Something like this did happen at the start of the 1949 Fall semester.

A long time CP member from Grand Rapids had enrolled as a student at MSC at that time. It was probably the Detroit bureaucracy that had told him to join the campus Students for Democratic Action as an undercover agent. He was not to have anything to do with the MSC CP Club either politically or socially. Most of us knew nothing about him until he “outed” himself. His mission was to find out if any SP’s YPSL members had penetrated the campus SDA’s ranks. Apparently there was no such attempt by the “Yipsels” as they were not conspiratorial in nature as some of the Leninist sects and would have been open and aboveboard in working as part of SDA. So this young man surfaced from his “underground” assignment and joined the CP as any other member. The whole operation seems kind of childish in my estimation.

LEFT STUDENT CONFERENCE IN ANN ARBOR

Word circulated around campus that spring that a conference of left students was to be held at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor open to participants from schools all over the state. I was the only CP member from Michigan State who took Harry Doehne, Tony Radspieler, and a young married couple from India who had hung around our Progressive Club during the Wallace campaign to Ann Arbor in my car. Present were students from UM, MSC, Wayne State in Detroit and a number of smaller colleges around the state. I don’t remember the general theme of the conference but presentations were made followed by discussions over a number of topics that were of interest to left radical and liberal groups.

It was the first time I’d experienced organized Trotskyism in action. It was probably speakers from James P. Cannon’s Socialist Workers Party who blasted the “political gangsters” who dominated both the US Empire and the Soviet bloc. I also picked up a copy of a student pro-Trotskyist magazine named The Anvil and Student Partisan edited by Third Camp Trotskyist Julius Jacobson of New York, a member of Max Schachtman;’s Independent Socialist League. (Jacobson was also editor of the ISL’s theoretical magazine New International.) I found Anvil’s articles fresh and exciting, compared to the pedantic style of most CP publications. It was as hostile to the USSR and Communist China as it was the powers supporting the corporate capitalist bloc in the Cold War dominated by the United States. More heresy from the CP line which I told nothing about to my comrades! I kept this copy of Anvil in my possession for many decades. I ran into it again when I enrolled at the University of Chicago in 1951 where the student Politics Club made up of ISL and SP youth groups supported Anvil as their own on which ecology and sustainable living advocate Ernest Callenbach (1925–2012) was an editorial staff member, who was then studying at Chicago. I returned to East Lansing exhilarant at learning about more left options to the insular confinement of the CP. Political life was never the same again as the

undercurrent of doubt began to grow ever stronger in me. (On March 18 I turned 24.)

SUMMER INTERNSHIP PLANS JELL

I found a natural flair for journalism as my classes were going well. The summer hiatus was approaching and I needed to apply for my in practicum internship on some newspaper. I picked up a copy of newspapers listed for such possibilities from Prof. “Triple A” Applegate and began my search. I focused on a small daily in Southwestern Michigan named the Berrien Springs Journal-Era. Rurally situated Berrien Springs was in a strawberry-growing agricultural area, not far from St. Joseph and Benton Harbor on Lake Michigan and a short hop to South Bend, Indiana, home of Notre Dame University, I drove to Berrien Springs for an interview and was hired for a six-week stint starting after June finals at a small barely subsistence salary. The proprietor was a rock-ribbed Hoover Republican, a WWI vet and a stalwart of the town’s American Legion post. The editor was also a Republican but slightly more urbane and moderate. The owner said that “They talk about Mr, Hoover’s mistakes, but this country was a fine place until THAT MAN took over!” Even the boss’s son-in-law who was backshop foreman would chuckle at the old man’s extremism. I would have to lie very low about my politics that summer if I was to survive my internship. Fortunately, the editor referred me to a good place to live for the summer. It was at the home of a middle-aged couple where the husband was a UAW member working at an auto plant in South Bend and probably the only liberal Democrat in town. So securing the hire, I returned to MSC to finish the quarter.

Korean War Breaks Out!

No sooner had I settled into my summer slot at the Journal-Era when all hell broke loose and North Korean troops poured over the 38th Parallel on June 25 to invade South Korea to conquer it as “rightfully theirs,” backed by the USSR and Red China. I found this shocking as I was lulled into complacency by the world Communist movement’s Stockholm Peace Petition that only the capitalist West would start wars of conquest and that Picasso’s Peace Dove symbolized the politics of the Eastern bloc. On my first free weekend from the job I hurried to East Lansing to see what the Michigan Sunday Worker had to say. As I recall the line was that the US armed South Korean troops had attacked first and the forces of “world socialism” had struck back. I was confused and hardly believed this. If North Vietnam hadn’t planed to invade, how could they have taken almost the whole country including Seoul in almost days? In a retaliation it called a “police action,” the United States with 21 subordinate UN allies swung into action with General Douglas MacArthur in command launching a landing at Inchon and proceeded to clear the Communist forces south of the 38th Parallel. This brought a mass attack by the Chinese Red Army from the north. The war see-sawed back and forth without decisive advantage to either side until it ended with an armistice at Panmunjon in 1953. This stalemate continues to this day.

Millions died in that conflagration on both sides but I never saw it a conflict of good guys versus bad guys but an ongoing battle between the imperial forces on both sides of the Cold War turned hot. The Republic of South Korea was hardly a great democracy but a corrupt authoritarian client state for Western imperialism. In all this confusion I completed my internship at Berrien Springs and headed for Detroit to seek work for the remainder of the summer. There had been a long term strike taking place in Southwestern Michigan all that summer involving the United Electrical Workers (UE), then one of the remaining labor unions still influenced by the CP. I had saved clippings of the strike events from the regional papers. When I arrived in Detroit I stopped at the state headquarters of the CP and dropped off my clippings, in case the Michigan Sunday Worker might want to do an article on this strike. Then I checked inti a cheap downtown hotel and went to a movie, planning to hit the auto industry factory gates the next day. The movie was the Eric Maria Remarque classic “All Quiet on the Western Front” starring the pacifist Lew Ayres. When the movie reached the point when a soldier piped up and declared something like; “Why don’t they let us all go home and let the generals fight their own war by themselves?” The audience applauded with a great roar of approval. This indicated to me that the Korean War was not popular in Detroit.

When I returned to the hotel the desk clerk told me someone had been by looking for me while I was gone. Whoa! I’d told no one I would be staying in Detroit. Then as I walked across the lobby I noticed a heavy-set older man in civilian clothes sitting on a couch looking dourly at me. I immediately remembered him as my Red Squad interrogator back in January. I hurried past him and returned to my room. What had happened was obvious now. With a war on, the Detroit CP headquarters was being closely watched from the street by undercover cops and one of them saw and photographed me as I went in to drop off my news clippings and followed me to the hotel after I came out, with Sergeant Bullneck assigned to keep tabs on me in the lobby. I’d just better get the hell out of town! So next morning I barreled to Lansing to try my luck there in hiring.

BUILDING SEWER PIPE FOR THE CITY OF LANSING

I went to the Hod Carriers Union hiring hall in Lansing and I was hired as a laborer for an out-of-state concrete pouring company building huge sewer pipe sections for the City of Lansing at a high school playing field. We had a sizeable interracial crew on the project sent out of the union hall. The work was hard but the money reasonably good. I crashed in a spare room at Howland Co-op which was only half full with summer session students. I worked at this job until a couple of weeks before Fall registration when I decided to drive East to see my family. My old housemate Jerry Wyckoff asked if he could come with me and I said: “Sure!” He was particularly interested in the trip as I had told him about stopping by my cousin Lempi’s place in New York State who I hadn’t seen since the summer of 1947. I had told Jerry a lot about her as a political person so he was looking forward to meeting her.

ROSENBERGS ARRESTED FOR ESPIONAGE

While all these personal experiences were happening besides Korea, American communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were arrested on espionage charges for transporting US atomic secrets which created huge headlines for several years through their execution in 1953. Julius Rosenberg who had been in the Army Signal Corps working on the atomic weapons project was picked up and jailed on June 17, 1950 and his wife Ethel on August 11. While the CP protested them as innocent and protested mightily on their behalf, even that summer from most news reports their spying mission appeared credible to me. Later at their trial beginning on March 5, 1951 the death penalty loomed for them although the evidence concerning Ethel appeared scantier in that respect. But Ethel’s younger brother David Greenglass, also implicated in the charges, caved under terrorizing pressure by the Feds, and testified his sister had typed the report which contained the secret information about the particulars of the atomic bomb that had been passed on to the Russians. This sealed Ethel’s fate and she was electrocuted at Sing Sing along with Julius. So badly did the government want to fry both that the Greenglass confession had been coerced although there was no other evidence of Ethel’s having typed such a report. Michael and Robert Meerosol, the young sons of the Rosenbergs, under the name of their adoptive parents, as adults have worked unceasingly to clear their parents’ name, claiming that no such typed report was confirmed from any other source or time until their uncle’s courtroom collapse. Morton Sobell, also implicated with the Rosenbergs, after a long prison sentence at age 91 vouched for Ethel’s innocence in the transmission of such secrets. While the existence of a Rosenberg spy ring rang true to me, as a lifelong opponent of the death penalty I believe their execution was unjustified. The fact that the Rosenbergs were Jewish provided American anti-Semites with a field day at their expense with the vilest of propaganda. Memoir readers who want to know more about the Rosenbergs should consult Google and check out numerous books and articles written about them as the only American civilians to be found guilty of treason and executed during the Cold War.

COUSIN LEMPI (JANE) READS ME THE RIOT ACT

I was so glad to meet Lempi and Mickey after such a long time as they were to see me. But not long into the visit Lempi hit me full bore over my CP involvement. She had seen it all from her own experience and read me the riot act on Stalinism. I had no real defenses except to plead that most of my comrades were sincerely motivated people. Of course, she realized this because of her long history in radical politics but she was relentless in attacking the history of its bureaucracy citing the bloody developments of the Soviet Union under Stalin and the gross, deceitful behavior of the US CP. Of course, she was still a Cannonite Trotskyist at this time and was still supportive of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution led by Lenin. I felt totally drained by the time she was through. Meantime Jerry, a social democrat who had voted for Norman Thomas in 1948 and an admirer of the Scandinavian countries through books such as Marquis Childs’ Sweden—The Middle Way, enjoyed my take-down immensely. But ever the mentor of her foolish young cousin who she dearly loved, Lempi recommended I read books such as Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon and George Orwell’s 1984 which were new to me. Years later when I reconnected with Freddy Paine in Los Angeles, Lempi’s best friend and comrade from the 1930s, Freddy said that Jane, as Lempi was known in radical circles, was the most capable person she ever knew of de-Stalinizing young recruits from the CP orbit. She certainly had shaken me up and gone a long way into enabling my early departure from the CP. A short time later we bade Lempi and Mickey so long at their vacation retreat of Windy Hill and drove on to see Mamma and Irma back in Fitchburg before returning to State for the Fall quarter.

End of Installment 13