Rain Check on Revolution
Rain Check on Revolution
(See front cover) If Old Abe were livin' right now These are the words he'd say: 'This country with its institutions 'Belongs to the people who inhabit it! 'Whenever they shall grow weary 'Of the existing government 'They can exercise their constitutional right
'Of amending it 'Or their revolutionary right 'To dismember or overthrow it!' Whether or not A. Lincoln would use the above words right now, he did use them in his First Inaugural address in 1861. Proletarian Composer Earl Robinson has set them to music. And this week they will be used again at the opening of the Tenth National Convention of the Communist Party of the U. S. A. For the benefit of a Columbia Broadcasting System audience and as many thousands as can jam into Manhattan's Madison Square Garden a chorus of 500 is to singsong them as an addition to the repertoire of revolution.
That Abraham Lincoln is today a hero to U. S. Communists is a matter of plain geometry. In revolutionary jargon, Communist policy is known as the Party Line, and lately the Party Line has described a neat curve toward democracy. In recent Communist thought Lincoln, Jefferson, and Tom Paine have assumed a stature comparable to that of Joseph Stalin and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. However much this may surprise the bourgeoisie, Communists planned it that way. This week they also planned their convention and its publicized dramatics to impress upon all U. S. minds a man, a policy, a party, a program.
The man is from Kansas. Earl Browder was born in Wichita, 47 years ago. He never lets himself or his public forget it. Without a paternal grandfather who fought the British in the War of 1812, a father who begat six Middlewesterners, Comrade Browder might find it awkward to say, as he often does say: "Communism is 20th Century Americanism."
His life is an American biography. At nine little Earl was forced to leave grammar school to go to work. At 21 he was able to come home and announce that he had got that job as chief accountant. Comrade Browder even now says: "I was well handled personally almost everywhere I worked.''
But he was born with an urge to protest. At 15, he followed his father into the Socialist Party, and soon he was deep in Leftist ferment. When World War Objector Earl Browder emerged from Leavenworth Penitentiary in 1920, William ZebuIon Foster and "Big Bill" Haywood had splintered away from the Debs Socialists, had formed "Communist" parties. Two years afterward, with Browder close at hand, they fused their factions into the Communist Party of the U. S. A., affiliated with the Third International, plunged into the underground era of Communism. Then to be known as a Red was to be hunted, beaten, jailed; to be a Red was to belong to a party of revolution, completely futile because of its own factional revolutions. Assigned to China by the Red International of Labor Unions in 1927, Comrade Browder returned to New York in 1929, married a blonde Russian. In 1930 his party mentor and patron, General Secretary Foster, was ill and out of commission. So Comrade Browder took over the job as U. S. Communists' strategist-in-chief.
Communist Browder says of himself that his principal contribution to the party is an ability "to deliver our message effectively." By this estimate, he understates other Comrades' estimates of his potency in party councils, accurately measures his powers as an orator and teacher.
Usually in grey, always casually neat, he works (as only great individualists still do) twelve to 15 hours a day at his office in the nine-story Manhattan rookery where U. S. Communists have their national headquarters. The Party's manifold activities are centred there. At the front door a Negro rattles the cup for Loyalist Spain. On the ground floor is the Workers Library Bookshop, fountainhead of approved writings for the faithful. There also is the main office of the Daily Worker, the Party's official organ. The upper floor offices give the impression of being filled mainly with Negroes, intellectual Jews, a few sturdy young men and women who might have stepped from a Tennessee hill farm. In a top corner, remote from the proletarian hurlyburly, is the Browder sanctum.
Above and behind his desk is a black-and-white sketch of Joseph Stalin, another of sainted Karl Marx. On Comrade Browder's 47th birthday last week, a well-wisher gave a set of Franklin Roosevelt's collected state papers, tied in red ribbon and placed beneath the whiskered countenance of Marx. Undoubtedly Mr. Browder will digest Roosevelt II, as he has digested A. Lincoln and will discover much good Communist pabulum. In this he will have the help of Raissa Irene Browder, his wife, collaborator and co-student, who runs their modest apartment in Yonkers, rears three children on the Party's maximum salary of $35 a week, occasionally appears with her husband at Communist gatherings.
The Policy. Communists of course do not permit Comrade Browder or any other one U. S. citizen to prescribe the U. S. Party Line. But in practice a few Comrades with Comrade Browder's counsel do formulate it, as an interpretation (to fit U. S. conditions) of the supreme International Line. These are the 70-odd National Committeemen who have power to fire Mr. Browder, expel any Communist. Highest among these are the twelve who comprise the Political Bureau. High among the high are:
Clarence Hathaway, a blond Minnesotan who used to be a machinist, reporter, miner, now edits the Daily Worker. In recent years he has given its 45,000 readers (75,000 on Sunday) a cannily contrived mixture of sports, features, competently written news (much of it from United Press), and of course the necessary propaganda.
Jack Stachel, lean, black-eyed executive secretary of the Party, an expert in trade union organization and relations with established, nonParty unions.
Ella Reeve ("Mother") Bloor, now 75, and a wrinkled veteran of the Class War, still a potent voice in the inner councils, one of the party's most effective organizers among farm workers and unemployed.
Charles Krumbein, broad-faced secretary of the New York State Party, a skilled interpreter of party policy in the Daily Worker, other party publications.
Burly, brown James William Ford, first & only Alabama Negro candidate for Vice President of the U. S., who directs and personifies the Party's appeal to and work among his race.
William Z. Foster, now pretty much the respected Elder Statesman by virtue of his long service, his 1932 candidacy for President of the U. S.
Theirs and Strategist Browder's great problem is to minimize previous, abandoned strategies. Since 1917, Communists have wandered all over the politico-social lot. They have alternately bedeviled and catered to middle-class Democrats and Socialists who deviate, Right or Left, from the wavering International Line. In the U. S., they have successfully fostered their own trade unions, bored within A. F. of L. unions, wholeheartedly supported C. I. O. unions. Once they denounced the NRA as fascism. Today they damn all who damn Franklin Roosevelt. Most important, they have swerved from a concept of immediate world revolution to one of evolution toward revolution. Now that U. S. Communists want to unite with all progressive forces against domestic and world reaction, Mr. Browder must convince his fellow Americans: 1) that the Party is not to be shunned merely because it was of one mind yesterday, is of another today, surely will be of still another tomorrow; 2) that of whatever mind it may be, it will not necessarily be of Moscow's mind.
Ably and boldly, he strives to make a virtue of his difficulty. Says he: "Our Communist policy represents a constant struggle to meet more adequately the problems of a rapidly changing world. Every step we make in this direction is a contradiction of the position from which we stepped. Far from wishing to hide these contradictions, we would push them forward ... as the highest lesson we have to teach--the cause of change, its technique, its timing--the why, how. and when--in short, the process of history in the making. . . ."
Today the chief thing which Communists have to bear in mind in shaping their Party is the vigorous scrawl which Fascism is making on the page of history. To disillusioned Communists everywhere, the triumphs of Messrs. Hitler and Mussolini demonstrate that a collapse of bourgeois democracy is more likely to be followed by fascist dictatorship than by the dictatorship of the proletariat. The same events also have shown that while the Party may survive, it does not thrive in graves and concentration camps as it does in kindlier bourgeois airs. For that reason chiefly, Mr. Browder & Comrades this week invite Roosevelt Democrats. C. I. O. Laborcrats, William Allen White Republicans, rank and file socialists, progressives of all hues to join the Communist Party in an American People's Front.
The Party. There are now about 65,000 dues-paying U. S. Communists. About 10,000 more are signed up with the party but are delinquent in dues, therefore not represented at this week's convention. Of the 65,000, the principal groups are: in New York, 30,000; Pennsylvania, 4,800; California, 4,600; Illinois, 4,500; Ohio, 2,600; Washington. 2,300; Michigan, 1,700; Wisconsin, 1,200; Minnesota, 1,400; New Jersey, 1,100; Massachusetts, 1,200. In no other State has the party over 1,000 paid-up members.
With U. S. Communists today, as is always true of Left-wing groups, numbers are not a conclusive gauge of strength. The Party looks upon itself as a hard and pervasive core within a vastly larger body. Having recently embraced a program so broad that no liberal citizen could oppose it in toto, Communists now claim that a vast majority of citizens favor it. For instance, a poll of 418 authors discloses that only California's Gertrude Atherton espouses Francisco Franco's cause. Communists are pleased, for they espouse the cause of Loyalist Spain. President Roosevelt frowns vaguely at the Fascist dictatorships. Communists are pleased. C. I. O. industrial unionism grows apace. Communists rejoice.
The Program is to be embodied this week in a master resolution and in U. S. Communists' first generally published constitution. Both were drafted by the National (formerly Central) Committee and the Polbureau, were then O.K.'d by State conventions. Chief object of both documents is to put down in black and white the Reds' assurance that they mean well by all good Democrats, harm to none. Constitutional excerpts:
P: "The Communist Party of the U. S. A. upholds the democratic achievements of the American people. It opposes with all its power any clique, group, circle, faction, or party, which conspires or acts to subvert, undermine, weaken or overthrow, any or all institutions of American democracy. . . ."
P: "All Party members in mass organizations [trade unions, farm and fraternal organizations, etc.] shall work jointly in a comradely manner to promote and strengthen the given organization. It shall be the duty of Party members ... to explain the mass policies of the Party and the principles of Socialism, to endeavor to win support for them, and they shall abide by the democratic decisions of the mass organizations."
P: "The Communist Party of the U. S. A. is affiliated with its fraternal Communist Parties of other lands through the Communist International. . . . Resolutions and decisions of International Congresses shall be acted upon by the supreme authority* of the Communist Party of the U. S. A.. the National Convention, or between (biennial) conventions, by the National Committee."
At the most, U. S. Communists ask their willing and unwilling allies to unite upon a 17-point program, extending from soak-the-rich taxation to equal rights for Negroes (who in several big cities lend the Party considerable support). The gist of the program is condensed in the Party's No. 1 Slogan: "For Jobs, Security, Democracy, and Peace." As a minimum basis for democratic coalition, Communists propose: 1) support the bulk of Franklin Roosevelt's domestic policy; 2) bring to bear all possible pressure for abandonment of his hands-off neutrality policy; 3) collaborate with France and Soviet Russia; 4) promise collaboration with Great Britain if it reverses its present, conciliatory approach to the Fascist powers.
U. S. Communists hardly hope to appease the wrath of the institutions which are today their arch-opponents--the Catholic Church, New York's Senator Royal S. Copeland, Publisher William Randolph Hearst, Esquire's new offspring, Ken, etc. Moreover, they are fully aware that it will do them no good to support democratic institutions unless they can get other parties to play ball with them. Since other parties are still afraid of openly accepting Communist allies, U. S. Communists ingratiatingly offer to withhold their own candidates from 1938 Congressional. State and local elections if other tickets present progressive nominees.
Thus Communists this year will support Farmer-Labor Progressives in Wisconsin and Minnesota, American Labor Party candidates in New York, C. I. O. Non-Partisan League indorsees everywhere. Just how far the Party will go to obtain or retain a foothold in its own "Democratic Front" was made clear last week after the defeat of Communist-indorsed C. I. O. candidates in Pennsylvania. Rather than put up certain losers in the Fall elections, the Party ordered all good Communists to vote for the regular Democratic nominees, including Governor-Nominate Charles Alvin Jones.
By inviting capitalist democracy's confidence and respect, U. S. Communists also invite the question: "What of the revolution?" Answer is that Communists have no more love than before for capitalist democracy. They have faced the facts that: 1) U. S. people do not now want a socialized order, 2) the Party needs democracy as an ally against fascism. As Comrade Browder put it in 1936: "A consistent struggle for democracy and progress leads inevitably, and in the not distant future to the socialist revolution."
*Constitution of the Communist International, as republished by the U. S. Party press in 1936, declares unequivocally that the International's Executive Committee is supreme over all national "sections" or parties. Up to now all deviators from the International Party Line have been expelled, but the U. S. Party is in good standing.
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