Exit CP, Graduate

I arrived at East Lansing a few days before Fall enrollment at MSC, my final quarter before graduation. Met a couple of comrades, a woman named Jan and a fellow Howland Coop housemate Bill at a coffee house the first evening. Afterwards, I drove Jan to her dorm with Bill in tow. We sat out in her dorm’s parking lot for about an hour, expressing our fearful concerns about the world scene and the Party. Jan had stayed at her parents’ place in Chicago all summer with no comrades to talk to. The same with Bill who hailed from the Detroit area.  Most frightening of course was the Korean War which strongly impacted our lives now. Was it true that Communist North Korea was the aggressor in the war? How would domestic repression affect our lives because of it in the increasing anti-Communist environment? Would we share the fate of the US CP leadership now languishing in prison under the Smith Act? Was it just capitalist propaganda or was it true about the Rosenbergs being spies engaged in espionage for the Soviet Union? We’d all read in the press about an American ex-Soviet woman spy, with a Russian last name jumping out of a NYC high rise to commit suicide whose name I’ve now forgotten? We were sharing our doubts on all these subjects, especially me if you’ve read about them in Memoir #13. We parted company disturbed in our contradictory thoughts. This was the only conversation of this sort I ever had with my comrades during my CP tenure.

Some of my housemates who were in the  Reserves got called for active duty by the war. “Pop” Fields, a fortyish Naval reservist, was one of them. We received word that Mel Montee, an Air Force Reservist was  killed when his plane was shot down over Korea. Nice guy, and the only Howland House resident killed in this “police action” in my memory. I was immersed in gloom as I resumed my Sunday Worker route in Lansing’s Black community. My cousin’s blast at my politics kept rising to the fore. Am I peddling a bunch of shit to these good people, or is this the real  deal? I needn’t wait for the answer for long.

One day I dropped off to see my campus comrades I’ll call Levi and Gina, a married couple who lived in some prefab family student housing with their two young children, a girl about three and an infant son. They were having a tough job of it economically as Levi had spent WWII in the Merchant Marine and wasn’t eligible for GI Bill Veterans’ benefits.  Levi was an art history major and had to depend on his sailing days’ savings, a low wage part time campus job, and help when possible from his working class Slavic Jewish parents in New York City. The couple had met as teenagers in the YCL in New York, Gina coming from an Italian immigrant working class background.  A sweet couple with Levi also graduating the end of this quarter. What they told me that day hit me in the solar plexus!

EXPULSION IN WORKS FROM DETROIT

They reported that CP functionary Jack Gore had come to see them one day saying charges were being brought against them for anti-party activity by State Headquarters setting a date for a campus CP club hearing at Levi’s and Gina’s home on a certain date. Gore had instructed them not to say anything to their comrades on the campus about any aspect of it. But I’d always been on friendly personal terms with them and they did tell me. Detroit finally sent notice to MSC Club members about the meeting and a number of us showed up.

GLADSTONE AS GLETKIN

The hearing bureaucrat was Marvin Gladstone, an unsmiling hard core type, the guy who a year or so ago had thrown an apoplectic fit when I mentioned to him that I had a Trotskyist cousin, ordering me to stay away  from her as these types are vermin, foul filth, and poison of the worst sort. So I looked forward to an awful evening. Gladstone’s charges consisted of several lesser items such as neglecting to gather signatures for the Stockholm Peace Petition (of which I could have been guilty, too), But the most serious item was that the couple was associating with Party “renegades” on an ongoing  basis.

This accusation involved an older 50ish couple living in Lansing, long time CP members Foss and Marion Baker, who either had been expelled or broken with the Party fairly recently.  I had known them only slightly as they weren’t part of our campus club. Foss had been a union rep for a public employees’ union trying to organize Michigan State House workers in Lansing,  which was one of the unions with a CP leadership. It had been “outed” for its Red politics by mainstream labor on Taft-Hartley grounds and Baker lost his job. I faintly remember that he was working as an insurance agent now.  The Bakers were childless and seeing that Levi and Gina were in dire economic straits, had helped them out, with food, money and clothing for their babies ever since they first met them when they came to State, acting as surrogate parents.

Gladstone tore into the charged with vehemence for their continued relationship with these Party “renegades.” They weren’t to defend themselves but to be part of the CP’s “criticism and self-criticism” process in which they would recognize and admit to  their guilt prior to expulsion. For those who read Arthur Koestler’s dystopian novel Darkness at Noon may recall the old Bolshevik Rubakov had come to believe in his own guilt through the dialectical process used by his interrogators Ivanov and Gletkin before his execution. If Levi had lived in Stalin’s time during the 1930s Showcase Trials he could well have ended his days in some dank cell in Lubyanka Prison with a bullet in the back of his brain, Gina sentenced to servitude in a slave labor camp, with their children taken over by the state. But Gladstone had no such powers in East Lansing.

As the foul breath from Detroit contaminated the room at this session, Gladstone got two supporters from our club ranks who spoke his line. One was Moe who had been involved in the same YCL cell in New York as Levi and  Gina. He and Levi had been in the Merchant Marine together during WWII and worked as volunteer organizers for the National Maritime Union. In one of his comments Moe introduced a criticism which wasn’t even included in the original charges: “Levi started at Michigan State with a useful and practical major in Soil Science but then his petite bourgeois character  surfaced when he switched to Art History as a major.” No further comment to this point. I thought to myself: “I don’t belong here. This was not how I was raised, in the democratic, fair-minded climate of the Finnish socialist immigrant cooperative farmers’ movement.”

LEVI COUNTERATTACKS

At this point Levi had had enough and rose to make his own statement, Meanwhile the rest of us remained silent in a cowardly huddle the whole hearing never saying a word in the couple’s defense or otherwise. But Levi was superb in his assertion: “I don’t—we don’t—care what you do, you can expel us from the Party if you choose but we are NOT going to sever our friendship with the Bakers. When we needed help they gave it to us unstintingly, helped feed and clothe our children, and enabled us to stay in school.  So do what you will. We know who our true friends are!” (These were the gist of his remarks as I recall.) The conclusion was obvious, the purge stood. There was no vote taken on the issue. “Democratic” centralism prevailed, from Detroit. Sleep didn’t come easily that night.

FINALLY I RESIGN

I felt listless and defeated the next day. I was to pick up my Sunday Worker bundle from the Lansing Railroad Station, for my Sunday rounds but just couldn’t do it. Finally, it was probably the FBI who took care of that problem for me. The bundle came in my name and one evening it was tossed on the front porch of Howland House. Another resident picked it up and brought it to my room and with me present told my roommate that “here’s a bunch of Harry’s subversive literature.” I immediately sprung into action and called Rick, the de facto Party Branch Secretary in Lansing and asked that he come over to Howland House right now. As soon as he came to my room, I handed him the Worker bundle and said it was his responsibility from now on. Further I announced my immediate resignation from the CP. He was shocked and I felt a bit sorry for him as Rick was a pretty decent guy. I explained my leaving was due to several factors but which culminated in Levi’s expulsion meeting the other night. Rick had been at the meeting, too, and had been part of our “silent majority.” He turned around and walked away dejected.

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

At Howland I only told Harry Doehne and Jim Sinkule about my exit from the CP. (Tony  Radspieler had graduated in June, 2014 and was now doing post-graduate work in Switzerland.) I drove over to see Gina and Levi and told them I felt like a free man now. They asked if I had resigned because of them.  “ You bet; how could I do otherwise?”

With my two-year immersion in CP politics over, I felt a vacuum within me, like a drunk would feel after successfully conquering a career with John Barleycorn. What would I do to replace it?  My immediate response was to engage more seriously with my studies. Although most of my grades had been excellent  during my academic career, my study habits had been erratic and slipshod. In the long run this gap was partially filled  by my eventual involvement with democratic socialist politics, which I approached through more rational critical thinking rather than as blind faith. During the remainder of the quarter I attended more of the excellent foreign films shown on campus and quality stage plays produced by MSC’s Drama Department. Whether it was during this stage or earlier, I saw an excellent interpretation of Arthur Miller’s quite new “Death of a Salesman.” The same went for William Saroyan’s  “Time of Your Life.”  These renewed my interest in live theatre that had been so much a part of my childhood, seeing so many Finnish language plays that my parents loved so much at the  immigrant socialist halls in New England.

JIM’S QUANDARY

The beer drinking continued with such buddies as Jim Sinkule, Mike Barney and Walt Hartman, too often to excess.  Jim was going through his own problems with the war that left him depressed. Though a WWII vet, a few summers back he and his friend Dave Rood, a writer for Michigan State News,  signed up with the Army Reserve to be able to take a special class in cryptology given at a service facility at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. It had been a fun summer for them chasing girls and hitting the bars there.  But now that we were in the middle of the Korean War, reality set in, inasmuch as these with reserve status were being called up for active duty by the Army. It wasn’t a popular war for most, and Jim thought that being a WWII vet was plenty for one lifetime. So he sat morosely in his room for many a night and barely kept up with his studies waiting for the inevitable call from Uncle Sam. Finally, he approached the ROTC commanding officer on campus about a deferment since he was scheduled to graduate in June of 1951 and was a veteran. Actually this made sense to the ROTC guy who put in the good word for Jim and greased the wheels for an education deferment to the following June graduation date.  His morale took a quantum leap upward.  So it became fun to savor the suds with him again.  The only regret I had now was in not dating Mary any more, of whom I was fond, as both her older brothers were still CP members. Too many tensions involved.

DURATION OF CP MEMBERSHIPS

Thinking of Mary’s brothers, I’ve pondered how long do most people stay Communist Party members?  My guess is not very long. To my. knowledge none of my MSC comrades I’ve heard about subsequently stayed. Some left due to ideological transitions. Especially during growing US government repression and the coming of McCarthyism many left out of fear, The Khrushchev Revelations, Hungarian Revolution and the 1968 Warsaw Pact armies’ invasion of Czechoslovakia brought about massive resignations around the world. With the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 the brightest star n  the Communist firmament was gone for good, subject to only nightmare memories. Journalist Lincoln Steffens’ summation after his first Russian visit that he had seen the future and it works, proved totally false  The totalitarian developments in China after the Communist victory  dispelled the illusions of many initial  admirers of Mao Tse Tung. Cuba is still a precarious one-party police state and it’s hard to predict what will happen there, but I’m glad US resumption of diplomatic relations with it will reduce its insolation. The US empire of capitalism may well swallow it up, but my best hopes would be a politically and culturally free form of socialism, though I’m not optimistic. There are a number of sterile Trotskyist-style sects floating  around that are of scant attraction to serious idealistic rebels; the kind who were involved during the brief flash of light provided by the Occupy movement.  What’s next, I don’t know. Does anybody?

WINDUP AT STATE

Being of proletarian stock and advocate of student cooperatives rather than the elitist social fraternities and sororities seen on campuses catering to the values of wealth,  I was invited to become a member of two honors-based fraternities. One was Sigma Delta Chi, a professional journalists’ society, the other was Phi Kappa Phi, to which invitation was based on academic excellence. So I was initiated into both at formal dinners. My degree indicated it was awarded with “High Honors”, comparable to Summa Cum Laude on many campuses.   Not bad for a guy who wasn’t the most diligent of students.

EAST COAST, HERE WE COME!

The Chevy was loaded up and I left with a car full of passengers. Levi had also graduated and I squeezed him, Gina and the babies into the cramped back seat as I was going to take them home to New York before swinging up to Fitchburg. I’d engaged a student who resided in a Jewish fraternity house to share the driving with me at no charge as he had a driver’s license  and was going to New York to spend the holidays with his parents. We drove through northern Ohio and passed the soot-covered snowbanks of Pittsburgh before swinging on to the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Everything went smoothly until we came to an off-ramp leading into Harrisburg, Then some ominous noises came from the engine like a death knell, and I swung onto the ramp when the motor died altogether and I couldn’t get it going again. I released the brake and led it coast down the incline until it came to a stop at a street at the outskirts of Harrisburg.

There was a gas station and a repair garage within sight to which I walked for help. Their tow truck pulled us in and after a look-see the problem was diagnosed as a frozen engine, The proprietor gave me an estimate of $300 to replace it for a new engine, but he would have to order it and this might take days.  Of course our carload of people couldn’t wait that long so the garage folks kindly drove us to the Greyhound Station in Harrisburg so we could continue on to New York. I made arrangements to contact them after the holidays after the new engine was installed and return by bus to pick up the car when ready. $300 was a bargain in those days.

Dead tired but wired, we ate at a local diner, bought some milk and other sundries to take along for us and the kids on the long bus haul to NYC. The bus was packed and as we headed into New Jersey we were caught in a raging blizzard that didn’t let up until we were nearly across the state. Traffic was slow and heavy in a creepy-crawl drive across the state.  We adults could in no way sleep at all despite our total exhaustion. Fortunately, the babes slept most of the way and I don’t remember much crying.  Finally, we crossed into NYC through the Holland Tunnel and disembarked at the Port Authority mid-Manhattan bus terminal. There we separated and after some fond hugging as grateful survivors, Levi, Gina with kids in tow went off to make some subway connections to Long Island. I stayed in the terminal for my New England connections on to Fitchburg where Mamma and Irma were waiting for me as was my bespoken holiday gig at the Post Office.

End of Installment 14