Party Life

I CONFESS--Benjiamin Gitlow--Dutton ($3.75).

Red letter day in the Red career of big, soft, heavy-eyed. 48-year-old Benjamin Gitlow came on May 14, 1929. The scene was Moscow's regal Red Hall. The occasion: a full meeting of the Praesidium of the Communist International. Purpose: to whip the recalcitrant U. S. delegation (Gitlow, chairman) into line behind Boss Stalin. In charge was Stalin himself. It was 4:00 a. m. Leaden-eyed, grey-faced with weariness and capitulation, the world's top Communists had heard Stalin denounce the U. S. comrades as Right Wingers, "rotten" diplomats, Hooverites, Babbitts, bourgeois opportunists.

Then Comrade Ben Gitlow rose to speak. He knew he was licked. But he knew U. S. workers were not quite ready for a Bolshevik revolution. Again he pleaded that Stalin not completely hogtie U. S. Communists with Russian foreign policy. Concluded Gitlow: "Not only do I vote against the decision, but when I return to the United States, I will fight against it!" Followed a moment of heavy silence; then a low whewing whistle of collective shock.

Stalin bounded to the platform. Gone in a flash was his Little Red Father pose. This time he really let the U. S. comrades have it. Snarled Stalin: The U. S. comrades can go home right away, and "the only ones who will follow you will be your sweethearts and wives."

Forthwith Comrade Ben Gitlow was expelled from the Executive Committees of the Communist International and Pro-fintern (Red International of Trade Unions), replaced by William Foster as General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U. S. A. Back in the U. S. a month later, he refused the CPU's offer of a job in Latin America to keep his mouth shut, was kicked out altogether.

To recall the background of that historic tangle with Stalin, Ben Gitlow, highest placed and most articulate U. S. Communist yet to spill the beans, last week published a 611-page confession of his Party life. It is a lively and extraordinary history. Unlike most ex-Communists, Author Gitlow does not try to prove that his brand of Communism was right, that of the Stalinites wrong. Given Marx and Lenin, concludes Author Gitlow, Stalinism is inevitable; Fascism also. As for his own role in the Party, Author Gitlow confesses he was no better than the next one --though naturally he credits himself with better brains, if not better morals, than most of his comrades.

The U. S. Communists of Gitlow's memoirs are in dead earnest about the "proletarian revolution"; their activities frequently have serious consequences for their followers and U. S. labor. But they figure nevertheless in scene after scene of political opera bouffe which even the most gifted satirist would be proud to have invented. Typical scenes:

>The "underground" Communist convention of 1922 (Gitlow, chairman), convened in deep woods near the village of Bridgman, Mich., with night sessions by torchlight to ape Old Bolsheviks under the Tsar. Between sessions the comrades played poker, told dirty stories, went swimming, romanced with female delegates, played practical jokes on the three Russian observers from Moscow (Comintern "Reps"), threw a shoe at one who kept them awake while he wooed Comrade Rose Pastor Stokes. Every bush concealed a caucus.

Convinced at last that the village was full of Government agents, they hurriedly prepared to disband. Taxis called for them. The last group was to burn all documents. But General Secretary Ruthenberg furtively buried them in a barrel in plain sight of a Federal undercover agent, lingered theatrically to let himself be arrested. Earlier, serving a 5-10 year sentence with Gitlow in Sing Sing, Comrade Ruthenberg had amazed fellow-convicts with a Romeo and Juliet exhibition as he wooed a female comrade "with all the ardor of an impetuous lover."

>One day Acting Secretary Earl Browder was tipped off by his caucus spy that Israel Amter, one floor above, was cooking up a double-crossing caucus bulletin. Bounding up the stairs, Browder rushed at Amter, seized a corner of the sheet, panted his command to give it up. Comrade Amter said it was none of Comrade Browder's business. Browder, bloodshot with importance, turned to Gitlow: "As a member of the Central Executive Committee, I, the secretary of the Party, order you to direct Comrade Amter to turn the paper he has in his hand over to me." Replied Comrade Gitlow lazily: "If what Amter has in his hand is a caucus document and you want it, please turn over all of your caucus documents first." Browder departed with dire growls. Gitlow, who prided himself on his superior spy service, smiled maliciously.

By no means all Author Gitlow's reminiscences are as amusing. Sophisticated readers may find entertainment in his spirited accounts of the ceaseless factional fights which turned the Party into a Muscovite Tammany, with slander, snooping, blackmail, character assassination, double-dealing, backstairs intrigue, horse-trading, spying, sabotage, as chief weapons in the struggle to win Utopia for the masses.

Gitlow tells how the Communists raised Party funds through defense campaigns for Sacco & Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, starving British miners; how they hushed up the fiasco of the $250,000 "gold bonds" which were sold to finish building a $3,000,000 co-operative apartment house in The Bronx. (Though sometimes it worked the other way, as when a Lett comrade, entrusted with $50,000 for the U. S. Party, used the money to set himself up in business in Chicago.) Highlights are his accounts of how Communists organized the Federated Farmer-Labor Party in 1923 to back La Follette for President, wrecked it on orders from Moscow; of how Communists used gangsters in the Furriers strike of 1926; of Communists in the needle trades (Gitlow in charge), of the Anthracite strike which Foster sabotaged (says Gitlow) in order to put his factional enemies on the spot in Moscow.

In the same class are his revelations of how Communists broke up meetings of Socialists, liberals. A particularly good example was a meeting at Manhattan's Town Hall, broken up by Communist hooligans because Roger Baldwin called attention to Russia's political prisoners. Roger Baldwin's American Civil Liberties Union later persuaded Governor Al Smith to pardon Author Gitlow from Sing Sing, while Gitlow's own comrades, busy organizing the International Labor Defense, did nothing. In fact the opposing faction considered it a stroke of luck to have Gitlow out of the way.

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