The Little Commissar

(See Cover)

Frankie Waldron, with his wavy brown hair, his snappy clothes and his electric smile, was as handsome as a junior Arrow Collar Man. Frankie's family was far from well-to-do, but Frankie danced and wisecracked his way into Franklin High School's social upper crust. He was manager of the basketball team, manager of the senior play, and a passionate, if reedy-voiced, star of the debating team. Just about everybody who knew him in Seattle back in 1923 predicted that Frankie Waldron would go far.

Last week, a quarter of a century later, Frankie's star had come to rest in the Federal Courthouse in Manhattan's downtown Foley Square. He was on trial for conspiring to teach and advocate the overthrow of the U.S. Government. On the indictment, Frankie was listed under the pseudonym by which he was more widely known: Eugene Dennis. He was general secretary of the Communist Party, U.S.A.

Frankie had gone far, in a curious way. He was boss of one of the noisiest and most pertinacious minority parties in U.S. history, which now, generally discredited, was fighting for its life. Lawyers for the defense argued that fundamental rights of U.S. citizens, such as the right of free political thought, were at stake in the case. The legal battle would certainly go to the Supreme Court. Secretary Dennis was the cynosure among the other ten Communists on trial with him. He was surrounded by an aura of mystery. According to the party's carefully manufactured legend, he had come out of the lumber camps of the Northwest. At first glance he looked the part--big, broad-shouldered, ruddy and impressive. At second glance he turned out to be a puffy, tweedy, middle-aged man with fluffy grey hair, a small, uncertain mouth and plump, pink cheeks.

Behind the legend of the revolutionist was the real story of Frankie Waldron, the middle-class boy who never quite made good.

Rebel's Home. Frankie was the son and namesake of Francis X. Waldron. Around the turn of the century, Waldron Sr. left his home in New Jersey to try his fortunes in the West, tried prospecting in Alaska, drifted back to Seattle and in 1904 married Nora Vieg, daughter of a Minnesota farmer of Norwegian antecedents, at the First Methodist Church. Frankie was born the next year.

Waldron Sr. was a small, grey, wiry man who kept his own counsel, spent most of his time at home hidden behind his newspaper. He was a rebel against steady work, a smalltime promoter of various large-sounding enterprises which never quite seemed to pan out. Father was a rebel in other respects. He disliked such contraptions as the automobile. He suspected such institutions as the telephone company; when he decided the company was cheating him on toll calls he had the telephone taken out, never would have it put back.

After Frankie's mother died in 1916, father was married to Amelia Kien. Times were better. The family moved into a better house and Frankie led a pleasant life. His stepmother and sister Nora were devoted to him. He swam in Lake Washington, tinkered with a $10 motorcycle which he could never make run, worked at a few after-school jobs. The most disagreeable of these was cleaning out a horse stall under a store on Rainier Street; Frankie was never much at manual work. His ambition, as he was achieving social success at Franklin High, was to go to college. Then father went stony broke.

Rebel's End. Instead of going to college after high school, Frankie first had to go to work. He was a good salesman and in a year he made enough money selling children's swings, and later electric drills, to start himself out at the University of Washington. He had become a serious young man, a reader of H. L. Mencken's green-covered American Mercury--not a radical, merely an earnest explorer of panaceas for the common man. Then father's health began to fail.

His freshman year was his last year. He worked at odd jobs, to help support the family, and hung around Seattle's A.F.L. Labor Temple. There he listened to lectures delivered by old Wobblies, old Socialists and some advocates of communism. Franklin High's lively graduate had become a sullen young man, outraged by his family's plight and the collapse of his long-cherished plans for college. Half in despair, half in defiance, he formally joined the Communist Party.

Father, for his part, suffered his last blow from a society which had never quite suited him anyhow. He had to be committed to the Northern State Hospital, where he died of "general paralysis of the insane." The hospital sent Frankie all of Waldron Sr.'s worldly goods: a crumpled leather cigarette case, a Seattle streetcar token, and a worn 25-c- piece.

Love in Woodland. In South Pasadena, Calif., where he had taken his stepmother and Nora, Frankie Waldron fingered the mementos and closed that preliminary chapter in the career of a revolutionary. He was absorbed in Communist reading matter, furiously wrote Communist tracts. He worked only when his stepmother and Nora were down to the last dime. Salesmen's jobs were "bourgeois," he orated. His stepmother pleaded with him to make something of himself. He told a friend: "Humanity's welfare is far more vital than my desires in life." He worked briefly as a puddler in a steel foundry--until one day he received his reward for devotion to the cause. He was put on the Communist Party payroll as a $15-a-week instructor. The Waldrons went their separate ways, Nora to go into show business, Amelia to work in a library. Frankie, seedy-looking and burning-eyed, with a shock of wild hair, went off to teach Marxist economy at a youth seminar at a Finnish community in Woodland, Wash.

Among his students was Reggie Schneiderman, nee Karasick, the wife of Willie Schneiderman, another paid functionary of the party. Willie had stayed at his assignments in California. Reggie, born in Brooklyn, was 19, cute and lively, with dark curly hair. In the summer woods of

Woodland, Frankie Waldron fell in love. At the end of the session when Willie arrived to reclaim his wife, Frankie and Reggie had to tell him that he had arrived too late. Willie disconsolately went back to Los Angeles to immerse himself in party work and later got a divorce. Frankie and the new Mrs. Reggie Waldron returned from Woodland to set up Communist housekeeping in Southern California.

Half Citizens. The U.S. Communist Party, born in 1919, was a rachitic child dropped on the U.S. doorstep by the Russian Revolution. The U.S., historically crowded with rebels and reformers--vegetarians, Fletcherizers, yogi followers and deep-breathers; Know-Nothings, Single-Taxers, Abolitionists and seekers after Utopias; Tom Paines, John Browns, W. J. Bryans and Gene Debses--always had room for one more heresy, even a foundling of communism.

The infant was not big. Up to the time Frankie was falling in love in Woodland, the party had never had more than about 10,000 members. But what it "lacked in size, it made up for in lung power. Its piercing Marxist cry--that capitalism was robbing the worker of the wealth which he alone created--burned into the souls of some Americans like a hot skewer.

Its early history was an internal struggle for political power. One of its clawing rivals for leadership was William Foster, head of the Trade Union Educational League, the party's labor decoy. He was born in Taunton, Mass, in 1881, onetime worker in a rendering plant, seaman, streetcar motorman, homesteader, gandy dancer, Wobbly and hobo. Stalin ended all rivalries in 1930 by enshrining Earl Browder at the top. Browder, born in Wichita, Kans. in 1891, was a onetime bookkeeper for a drug house, flute player, mystic and draft resister in World War I, for which he went to prison.

They were failures in the community. As all good Communist leaders must be, they were men with a talent for subservience, half citizens in the half-lit world of the Communist conspiracy. To rule, it was necessary to take orders. The only True Word, they taught as they had been taught, was the word from Moscow. Actually political neuters, they lived by the rule that the Comintern was the responsible custodian of men's minds and men's consciences.

The Almost Martyr. The Word sent by Moscow in 1930 to the Communist Party, U.S.A. was: "Seize the streets." It meant: riot, raise hell, harass the law. If heads were cracked, so much the better; cracked heads made martyrs. In the first year of the great depression, California's population was resentful and disorderly. Thousands were out of work. The arm of the law was muscular and impatient.

Frankie was pinched trying to organize the pea pickers of the Imperial Valley. Frankie was pinched for unlawful assembly in Los Angeles. He was in jail the night before Reggie bore him a baby, Timothy. His ostensible employment was that of an ice man. With that other, ever-loyal functionary, Willie Schneiderman,* he tried to organize the waterfront, and began to attract the attention of party headquarters in New York. He was charged with resisting arrest during a melee in Los Angeles' Plaza. Then during an unemployment demonstration he waved a placard reading, "Defend the Soviet Union," and got a sentence of $500 fine and 180 days in jail. Frankie almost became a martyr then, but the party had other plans for him. On orders, Frankie jumped bail and vanished into the party's underground.

One night Reggie called for Mrs. Amelia Waldron in a curtained car and drove her to a hideaway on the city's outskirts. There was Frankie. He told his stepmother excitedly: "I'm going to Russia. You'll hear from me." That was the last Amelia ever saw of him. She did hear from him by way of an occasional postcard from Europe. Some years later a Los Angeles lawyer told her to stop around at his office, there confided to her that Reggie was happy, that Timothy was learning to speak Russian, and that Frankie was enrolled at the Lenin Institute in Moscow.

Young Man in Tweeds. For Frankie Waldron, those months between postcards were an odyssey. He had fled the U.S. on a passport made out to "Paul Walsh." Reggie had followed him as "Mrs. Walsh," presumably taking Timothy with her. Frankie went to Europe, probably stopped in at Moscow, went to South Africa, on to China, then back to Moscow.

If Frankie ever had any doubts about the choice he had made, he was sucked in now; there was no turning back. In Shanghai, living at the Foncin Apartments, 643 Route Frelupt, he operated as a Red organizer. He used many aliases. Somewhere along the line he decided that he would become "Eugene Dennis." So far as he was concerned, Francis X. Waldron Jr. was dead and buried. Not a trace of him remained, not even a Seattle streetcar token.

In 1935, Eugene Dennis, a tall, tweedy, pipe-smoking young man, showed up in the Communist circles of Milwaukee with his pretty brunette wife, "Peggie." Timothy was not with them. So far as any records show, Timothy was, never brought back to the U.S.

Children of Revolution. By then, the party line had been changed. The orders from Moscow were to soft-pedal talk of revolution, work surreptitiously, bore into labor, into Roosevelt's New Deal. It was the beginning of the Pink Decade, when communism hid its face behind a hundred bland fronts, and thousands of U.S. citizens--the well-meaning, the intellectual, the starry-eyed and the muddleheaded--flocked around its feet.

In those Popular Front days, Organizer Dennis operated from a bare, dirty, guarded office over the Oneida Restaurant at 113 East Wells Street, Milwaukee. His methods and objectives were multifarious.

He taught the gospel to the young at a "labor school." He used gullible university professors to drum up recruits among their students. He threw parties to recruit young men for the war in Spain. After the youths had had a quantity of Dennis' liquor and a good dose of his oratory, their duty became plain. He arranged their passports and sent them packing, full of zeal. For Dennis, no chance for conquest was to be neglected. One of his followers, pretty, brown-haired Ann Sabljak of the Young Communist League, wriggled her way into the Methodist Episcopal Church's old Epworth League. One ex-Red remembers a Sunday night when Ann got an Epworth League discussion group around to agreeing that if Christ were alive today he would be a strike leader and a revolutionist.

An Old Armchair. The man in tweeds did not confine his operations to the young. He captivated Meta Berger, well-to-do widow of Victor Berger, first Socialist Congressman. Plump, motherly, highly respected Mrs. Berger was entranced by the eloquence of handsome, charming Eugene Dennis. He persuaded her to go to Russia, and she returned piping the glories of the Soviet Union. Her country home became a second home for Dennis, who settled comfortably into the late Congressman Berger's old armchair. Meta Berger died in 1944, still not disabused.

But Dennis' chief exploit of the Pink Decade was in the labor field. He made a Communist out of violent Harold Christoffel, an aggrieved electrical apprentice at Allis-Chalmers, manufacturers of industrial machinery. Christoffel married Ann Sabljak. Under Dennis' direction, Christoffel engineered a seizure of the State C.I.O. Council. With the help of a goon squad, Christoffel seized and dominated Allis-Chalmers' C.I.O. auto workers' union. In 1941 Dennis' work paid off. It was the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, when

Moscow policy was to sabotage U.S. war production. Dennis' man Christoffel was able to strike the plant and close it up tight for 76 days. Allis-Chalmers was then manufacturing machinery for war; the strike was one of the costliest work stoppages of the whole U.S. war-production effort.

Again Dennis got his reward. He was called to New York to serve in the holy of holies--headquarters.

The Little Kremlin. All but the most secret Communist operations in the U.S. were, and still are, directed from the ramshackle, nine-story loft building at 35 East Twelfth Street, not far from Manhattan's Union Square. To its top-floor offices came the Communist International "Reps," the shadowy men with the changeable names like P. Green, G. Williams, A. Ewert, H. Berger, which in a wink of the eye might become Drabkin, B. Mikhailov, Braun or Gerhart Eisler. These were Moscow's agents. From the ninth floor the Word which they brought from Moscow was passed along to the faithful, to the party hacks on the Daily Worker and the Yiddish-language Freiheit, to the cultivators of organized labor's vineyards, to men like Christoffel in Milwaukee.

Dennis served as a kind of handyman. He ran errands. He followed orders and aped his superiors. He coddled such Commie fronts as Negro Leader Max Yergen's National Negro Congress and cynically betrayed them. (Years later disillusioned Max Yergen declared: "I was finally repelled by the lack of principle, the moral rottenness of Communist Party practices.")

Dennis' chief Earl Browder was sent to jail for the popular Communist felony of passport fraud. Robert Minor, an elderly and bemused ex-St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoonist, was given the temporary job of boss. But Browder, let out of jail by Franklin Roosevelt, got his old job back and picked up the next line from Moscow. Hitler had marched on Russia. The new and urgent line was to make peace with the capitalist U.S., piously preach collaboration of all "democratic" forces against their common fascist enemy. Roosevelt, who had been denounced as a "dirty warmonger," was a hero again at 35 East Twelfth Street.

The obedient Browder preached the doctrine from the housetops, and the obedient Dennis echoed him word for word.

The Hand of Moscow. Then destiny opened like a tunnel for the ninth floor's handyman. World War II ended. Collaboration ended with it. Moscow, triumphant and with other worlds to win, gave the order for a return to the war against capitalism. It meant another convulsive line-switch; it meant the end of Earl Browder. To underline the change which had occurred, Browder and "Browderism" were attacked with all the vituperation at the party propagandists' command.

Browder was kicked out of the party. Just to keep him on ice, Moscow commissioned him to act as an agent in the U.S. for Soviet publishers. In a one-room office on 42nd Street, he smoked his pipe and stared into space, loyally mumbling the line that the assassination of his character was only an "incidental of a political struggle." It was as close to accuracy as Comrade Browder ever got.

Dennis quickly learned the new doctrine and stared into the tunnel now yawning before him. Who would be chosen for Browder's job? There were some fairly smart men around headquarters: Jack Stachel, a little man with the face of a heron who had been in & out of the underground; cold, Kewpie-like John Williamson, national labor secretary. But Moscow's hand fell on the shoulder of U.S.-born Eugene Dennis.

Loudly and vehemently Dennis disclaimed Browderism, of which he had been one of the loudest mouthpieces when Browderism was the party line. He told the comrades: in their zeal to defeat Hitler, he and the other chieftains around headquarters had "dragged at the tail end of Roosevelt . . . did not adequately maintain our own Communist identity and vanguard role." This is the sin now known, in the Aesopian doubletalk of communism, as "tailism." Browder, said Dennis, was still hypnotized by his "original opportunist illusions." But Dennis' eyes had been opened. To the barricades!

In his tweeds, sucking on his pipe, or a cigarette, or a cigar--whatever came to hand--grey-haired, paunchy and tentatively smiling, the graduate of Franklin High School moved into the darkness of top leadership. The ancient William Foster was made chairman--actually, a secondary job. Eugene Dennis, as general secretary, became the little commissar.

Man on the Ninth Floor. Three years have gone by since the hand fell on Dennis' shoulder. They were times to try the soul of a less artful dodger. Times were not good for U.S. communism. Organized labor, which had once been so tolerant of the whole business, had reacted violently against it. The party which had once controlled a good chunk of the C.I.O. unions, retained desperate control in only two big ones: the electric workers and the West Coast longshoremen. The alien cast of communism's face became plain for everyone to see. The disclosure of Communist espionage sent Reds scuttling in every direction.

Like any good commissar, Dennis carried out Moscow's orders. But he was not too skillful as an executive officer and tactician. He tried, for example, to get Mike Quill, onetime devout party-liner, to throw the support of his C.I.O. Transport Workers Union behind Henry Wallace's presidential campaign. Quill refused. When

Dennis threatened, the unpredictable Quill dumped the Reds out of his union, declared open war on the party.

Dennis ran into personal trouble. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee demanded to know his right name. He refused to disclose it and spurned a subpoena. For that he was cited for contempt of Congress. The charge is still pending against him.

In his ninth-floor office he paced up & down at conferences, a sly, chain-smoking man from whom all humor had gone. Sometimes in the middle of a discussion he stepped outside and came back with a shot of whisky, which he downed straight.

People outside the office saw little of him. Every morning, a bespectacled chauffeur-bodyguard knocked on the sixth-floor door of his apartment at 420 West 119th Street (near Columbia University), escorted him down to a Chrysler sedan and drove him to the office. In the evening the chauffeur took him home again in the same solicitous fashion.

Peggie kept house in their small, spare, $70-a-month apartment. She gave callers the once-over through a peephole in the front door, although she chattered loudly and publicly over the pay telephone in the lobby. Curiously, the Dennises had no telephone. Now no longer active in the party, she brought up their second baby, Gene (bom in 1942), and prepared large meals for her chubby husband. The Dennises were scarcely noticed by the neighbors until the congressional inquiry disclosed his identity.

In the summer of 1948 the Government moved in on him and his party. That was how Frankie Waldron's star came to rest in the courthouse in Foley Square.

The Climax. Dead in the center of the battery of defending lawyers, he sat last week. So that he could make speeches, a right denied to a mere defendant, he had elected to be his own lawyer. He lounged in a red leather swivel chair, made a business of taking notes, glowered at Federal Judge Harold Medina, scowled at the back of the neck of U.S. Attorney John F. X. McGohey, stared at the Government witnesses, two FBI agents, who took the stand to add their testimony to the mounting evidence.

It was doubtful whether the charge--that he and the ten others were guilty of conspiring since 1945 to teach and advocate the forcible overthrow of the U.S. Government--weighed too heavily upon him. The legal battle stretched interminably ahead. There was even a chance that he might achieve, finally, a kind of martyrdom. In a perilous sort of way, the Government's attack had given his Communist Party a new prestige at the moment when its light was the dimmest it had been in over two decades.

Outside the courtroom he stood around smiling but narrow-eyed, shaking hands and receiving the adulation of the party faithful. No matter whether he was acquitted or convicted this was the triumphant climax of a career of 20 years. Whatever he felt in his innermost heart, like his father, he kept his own counsel. At each court day's end, he stepped along the marble corridor, hulking and heavy-footed, walking down his own dark tunnel.

*Later to be charged with taking an oath of citizenship to the U.S. while a member of a party pledged to overthrow the U.S. He was successfully defended before the U.S. Supreme Court by Wendell Willkie in 1943, and now heads the party in California.

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