communists-from-the-united-states

"Indeed, I had entered the red conspiracy in the vain belief that it was the way to a "new, better and superior" world system of society. Ten years later, thoroughly disillusioned, I abandoned communism. The experiences of those years in "outer darkness" are like a horrible nightmare. I saw communism in all its naked cruelty, ruthlessness and utter contempt of Christian attributes and passions. And, too, I saw the low value placed upon human life, the total lack of respect for the dignity of man, the betrayal of trust, the terror of the Secret Police and the bloody hand of the assassin, during and since, those fateful years when I embraced communism."

"Gilbert Green, one of the top Reds in this country, reported as follows: "For example in the South we have more than 300 members who are also members of church youth organizations—especially the Baptist Young Peoples Union. In this district (Alabama)...where possible we should build...units in the Church Youth organizations. Why? Because in the South, especially for the Negro youth, the church is the center of cultural and social activity. It is here that we must work. By building our units in the church organizations we can also improve our work under the illegal conditions, as it will be easier to work in the church organizations. In Alabama there are certain places in which we can in a short while take over the church organizations of youth, under our leadership, and these can become legal covers for our work in the South.""

"It is also implied that a Negro child is handicapped in his studies unless he is sitting beside a white child. What could be more nonsensical or ridiculous? It is a sad commentary on the ability of the Negro child to say that he cannot properly study or that he will develop harmful complexes if he does not sit beside a white child. By what quirk of reasoning does one conclude that sitting beside a white child will help a Negro child make the grade? Experience shows that a student's success is determined by how much attention, time and effort he is willing to put into his studies."

"This plot to use the Negroes as the spearhead, or as expendables, was concocted by Stalin in 1928, nearly ten years after the formation of the world organization of Communism. Prior to this time, the periodic Moscow gatherings did little more than pass resolutions. Any credit for the change belongs, in the main, to a handful of Negro lick-spittles like James W. Ford, Harry Haywood, Otto Hall, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, and Otto Huiswood, to mention a few."

"Black rebellion was what Moscow wanted. Bloody racial conflict would split America. During the confusion, demoralization and panic would set in. Then finally, the reds say: "Workers stop work, many of them seize arms by attacking arsenals. Many had armed themselves before...Street fights become frequent. Under the leadership of the Communist Party the workers organize Revolutionary Committees to be in command of the uprising. Armed workers...seize the principal government offices, invade the residences of the President and his Cabinet members, arrest them, declare the old regime abolished, establish their own power....""

"In this connection, I observed how white women communists are used as political prostitutes, cohabiting with high-level Negro communists in order to spy on them. Through such intimate relations, these white women communists are able to elicit information pertaining to family background, sources of income, marital difficulties, arrests, convictions, opinions on communist policy and communist leadership. This information is invaluable to the red hierarchy in their relations with their Negro lickspittles. In top red circles, this is known as "bedroom politics.""

"At the root of all the present racial trouble is interference in the internal affairs of Southern States by people not at all interested in an amicable settlement of any problems arising between Negro and white Americans."

"Mr. James R. Mitchell, Secretary of Labor, reported that the Department of Labor in a recent survey found that: "Purchasing power of the Negroes was more than $17,000,000,000 and that a third of the Negro population owned their own homes. Negro wage earners, he said, make four and a half times what they earned in 1940.""

"Few men want the medicine the reds gave the late Senator Joseph McCarthy which the reds boast is the best cure for militant anti-Communists."

"Abner W. Berry, columnist in The Daily Worker, official organ of the Communist Party, recently praised these ministers as fulfilling their "historic role," i.e., delivering the Negro into the hands of the Communists. Neither his pen nor his lips had such praise prior to the 1934-35 period. Then the Moscow line was clear. The resolution on the Negro Question stated: "In the work among the Negroes, special attention should be paid to the role played by the churches and preachers who are acting on behalf of American imperialism. The Party must conduct a continuous and carefully worked out campaign among the Negro masses, sharpened primarily against the preachers and the churchmen, who are the agents of the oppressors of the Negro race.""

"In the meantime the Negro is the sacrificial lamb — the innocent victim of the widespread racial hate which the leftists are creating. The energizing of race hate is an asset to the red cause. The more, the merrier, so long as it erupts in cross burnings, threats, loss of jobs, refusal of loans, boycotts, bombings, fist fights, beatings and shootings."

"Application of the new line embarked the Communists on an era of outstanding success in infiltrating and penetrating the Negro Church. White ministers acting as missionaries, using the race angle as bait, aided in the cultivation of Negro ministers for work in the Red solar system of organizations. Bribery through gifts, paid lectures, flattery through long applause at staged rallies, favorable mention in the red controlled press were not the only methods employed to corrupt the Negro ministers. The use of sex and perversion as a means of political blackmail was an accepted red tactic."

"Being a Negro top communist, I was placed on the National Negro Commission, an important sub-committee of the National Committee of the Communist Party. On this Commission, which was created on direct orders from Moscow to facilitate the subversion of the Negroes, I began to realize the full implications of how the Negro is used as a political dupe by the Kremlin hierarchy. Under the guise of "unity of black and white in the struggle," several top white communists, such as James S. Allen, Elizabeth Lawson, the late Robert "Bob" Minor, and George Blake Charney were placed on the National Negro Commission. These white communists wielded more power than the nominal Negro heads of the Commission. In a word, they are like white overseers. Every Negro member was aware of the fact that these white overseers constituted the eyes, the ears and the voice of the Kremlin. Moreover, these white overseers are the surest functional guarantee of the maintenance of the hierarchical authoritarian control of the Kremlin over their Negro lick-spittles directing the conspiracy among Negroes in America."

"Only after the order came from Moscow in the 1934–35 period to win over the Negro intellectual by deceptive flattery and adulation did the red's public attitude toward them change. The Kremlin concluded that these "superficial phonies" could serve the cause of Communism."

"The reds have deliberately twisted and warped the thinking of those intellectual pygmies who lead the "Freedom by '63" campaign by sending them after quick solutions of a centuries' old problem that has never been solved anywhere in the world. Obvious even to the most ignorant is the fact that all people are prejudiced. No one is free of it. Prejudice, in one form or another, has existed almost as long as the human family. They arise out of the complex differences of race, nationality, religion, economic, social and cultural standing."

"Posing as a "friend of the Negro," they, under the guise of a campaign for Negro rights, set race against race in the cold-blooded struggle for power. Their hypocrisy and the falsity of their claims are clearly revealed in a number of instances."

"In New York, for example, many Negro Junior High and High School graduates are outrageously poor in spelling, writing, reading and mathematics. Yet they attended integrated schools."

"A large number of Negro ministers are all for the Communists. Some are prominent and influential; others are "run of the mill." They in common believe that beating the racial drums is a short cut to prominence, money and the realization of personal ambitions even if the Negro masses are left prostrate and bleeding — expendables in the mad scramble for power."

"It is then no accident that the N.A.A.C.P. is dubbed "The National Association for the Agitation of Colored People." The record speaks for itself. Millions for agitation; not one cent for those things that win the respect and acclaim of other races and national groups."

"Therefore, we may readily assume that any damage done to our prestige abroad should be at the feet of the N.A.A.C.P. and the reds who started the trouble. What is significant is that those who spread the lie that violence erupted because Negro children are denied an education have not repudiated it. Any confusion or misunderstanding created abroad has not been cleared up by the N.A.A.C.P. leadership. At no time have they admitted that no Negro in the United States is denied an education. And, too, they have not admitted that not every Negro wants an education, for reasons better known to himself. That accounts for many Negroes not being able to read or write. Moreover, there are free schools open both day and night for all those who want an education."

"During the three decades which have elapsed since the Sixth World Congress in Moscow, the American Communist Party has conducted many campaigns and formed and infiltrated a large number of organizations among Negroes. From the bloody gun battles at Camp Hill, Alabama (1931), to the present integration madness, the heavy hand of communism has moved, stirring up racial strife, creating confusion, hate and bitterness so essential to the advancement of the red cause."

"White communist women are also used to maneuver top Negro reds into compromising positions that, if revealed, would result in public scandal or disgrace. In this way, the reds make these Negroes permanently subject to blackmail if they ever consider leaving the red movement. Moreover, this information is used to destroy the credibility of the defector, should he decide to fight the red conspiracy."

"What if one or five million Negroes die in an abortive attempt to establish a Negro republic? Is not the advance of the cause worth it? A Communist is not a sentimentalist. He does not grieve over the loss of life in the advancement of Communism."

"The new line went like this: Jesus, the carpenter, was a worker like the Communists. He was against the "money changers," the "capitalists," the "exploiters" of that day. That is why he drove them from the temple. The Communists are the modern day fighters against the capitalists or money changers. If Jesus were living today, he would be persecuted like the Communists who seek to do good for the common people."

"Indeed the spectre of the "Modern Carpet Bagger" haunts the South. Reds, NAACPers, do-gooders and other "missionaries" follow in the footsteps of those Northerners who for narrow, selfish, personal or political reasons meddled in the affairs of the South in the period immediately following the Civil War. Like their predecessors, these modern-day Carpet Baggers create only mischief for they have no true interest in the South. A check of the record of these modern-day Carpet Baggers will show that most of them are either Communists or persons who have been, or are now, associated with the Communist cause as a fronter, endorser, or fellow traveler."

"[V]ociferous Negro intellectuals, along with the reds, through their impractical, unrealistic, alien behavior, turn race relations into a shambles. Every Negro who opposes integration and the N.A.A.C.P. becomes a traitor or an "Uncle Tom." Every white person taking a similar stand is branded a "criminal" and "outside of the law." The fact that courts have been known to reverse themselves and that under our system of government every American has the right to protest and oppose any ruling considered onerous or prejudicial is ignored. Stupidly, they go about their business of forcing everybody to conform or be damned, thus building up fires of resentment that will require the work of centuries to extinguish. Already, under the guise of "struggling for Negro rights," they have created all the explosive material for racial violence by making impossible demands, resisting sane and just decisions, opposing compromise and adjustment and demanding that everything must be done forthwith or not at all. They have no love for their own people. They have no love for America. Naturally, they get the Kremlin's support and approval. Feeling frustrated and inferior, they run to communism and civil disobedience in their folly. They play Moscow's game and they deserve whatever red reward that is due them."

"The dark ages had returned; modern thought was again burning in the flames of a new inquisition, the Jews again afflicted with the yellow badge of shame."

"There will be another World War soon. Everything we think and do in the next decade will fall within that shadow, as Walt Whitman's generation fell under the Civil War. There is no escape; there is no alternative for the writer as for other men, but struggle or suicide. One will be forced into an attitude. I prefer life. It is life that has created the Communist movement, with a philosophy so tragic and honest that it can face the thought of the next world war, prepare for it, and go on building. No prayers, or pieties, or hocus-pocus of Fascist rhetoric but the habit of facing every day the hardest facts of life; building with them, seeing beyond them, using them for a great new objective. That is the way to write well, and it is Communism."

"The idea of money is so dominant in this country that anyone not part of money is made to feel ashamed."

"Gold is important to recover because he is one of dozens, hundreds of writers whose legacy and output was silenced by the Red Scare and Cold War. Gold’s project was to create a working-class literature written for, by, and about working-class people, and Gold understood that a working-class literature would also have to be a radical literature, and a racial literature. And he understood that such a project required conflict with a literary establishment. It would mean a literary class war."

"Mike Gold's initiation into the radical movement occurred in 1914 when he blundered into an unemployment demonstration in Union Square, listened to the "rebel girl" Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, and bought a copy of The Masses. Between 1915, when he contributed his first poem to Eastman's magazine, and 1921, when he joined the editorial staff of The Liberator, Gold lived the wandering and exciting life of the Bohemian-anarchist artist. He wrote three one-act plays for the Provincetown Players and spent a summer with the happy and hard-drinking group at the Cape. In New York, after attending rehearsals at the Provincetown Playhouse, he would join Eugene O'Neill and anarchist friends at a saloon on the corner of Fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, the "Hell Hole," and listen to O'Neill recite "The Hound of Heaven." Dorothy Day, a "rebel girl" of the Village and, later, the much-admired and selfless editor of the Catholic Worker, remembers at this time that she and Gold were reading Tolstoy together. "He used to make fun of my religious spirit," she wrote later, "but he himself was in sympathy with the Christianity expressed by Tolstoi, a religion without churches or a priesthood. Mike had a religious upbringing in his home on the East Side and liked to sing Yiddish folksongs and Hebrew hymns.""

"Hitler is a demagogue who has falsified history. He succeeds because his followers are too ignorant to know that he lies. The great mass of Jews in the world today are not millionaire bankers, but paupers and workers. I have told in my book a tale of Jewish poverty in one ghetto, that of New York. The same story can be told of a hundred other ghettoes scattered over all the world. For centuries the Jew has lived in this universal ghetto. Yiddish literature is saturated with the ghetto melancholy and poverty. And Jewish bankers are fascists everywhere. Hitler has received their support, both with money and ideas. Some of his most important secret conferences were held in the home of a Jewish banker. They gave large sums to his party before he came to power. Hitler's whole program is to save the banking and profiteering capitalist system. The attack on the Jews is merely a piece of demagogy, to throw the hungry German masses off the trail of their real enemy. No, every Jew is not a millionaire. The majority of Jews belongs to the working-class and to the bankrupt lower middle class. It is natural that in the present hour so many of them are to be found in the Socialist, Communist and trade union ranks. Jewish bankers are fascists; Jewish workers are radicals; the historic class division is true among the Jews as with any other race."

"War may have depended at times in the feudal past on the whim of emperors and kings. Today it is a respectable part of Big Business. It is as premeditated as a selling campaign by a large corporation. It is the last resort of national salesmanship."

"I have chosen the Communist discipline. Because Communism projects into the future, and not into the past, as does Fascismo, which is only a defense corps trying to save the rottenness of the past."

"It has become necessary now in America to fight against this great fascist lie. Recently, groups of anti-Semitic demagogues have appeared in this country. They are like Hitler, telling the hungry American people that capitalism is Jewish, and that an attack on the Jews is the best way of restoring prosperity. What folly! What criminal deception and bloody fraud! And there are signs that this oldest of swindles will grow in America. The defense of the Jewish race against these fascist liars and butchers has become one of the most necessary tasks for every liberal and radical. This is not only a problem for Jews to meet; it has become the problem of the workers and farmers whose hunger the fascists try to appease with the empty husk of anti-Semitism."

"We are entering a new period in the history of the American melting pot. Immigration has stopped, for one thing, and assimilation has begun. A bigger factor, however, is the great social change going on in America, a process that inevitably lines up the poor against the money-bags, the trade unionists against the exploiters, the men who battle for human rights against those who fight for property rights. Race lines vanish in such a conflict; the class issue cuts through everything. Even the Negro question is affected and will finally be settled as this fight goes on; and this question is surely the touchstone of all racial problems in America."

"This bourgeois form of art for art's sake is no longerworthy of one's comment or attack. It has only one useful purpose that I can still see: it numbs the minds of the exploiters. Let them continue to support it and be stultified."

"If Hitler consolidates his power we will see a world reaction infinitely worse than that which followed the events of 1848. Every sign of the faintest liberalism amongst the middle class intellectuals will be drowned in blood. The workers will be massacred, terrorized, forced into a medieval serfdom. It is war-time. We must close ranks or be annihilated. Hitlerism will spread over Europe and sweep America. Unless we unite. Unless there is a united front of all the workingclass parties and liberal groups. The Socialists and liberals may form such a front, leaving out the Communists. They may piously ignore the massacre of Communists, deeming themselves more respectable and hence safer. But this is a form of suicide, for Mr. Villard will find himself consigned to the hangman by an American Hitler as swiftly as any Communist. Every anti-fascist is needed in this united front. There must be no base factional quarrels. Leaders who stand in the way of a united front should be swept aside by the rank and file. We are faced with the death of the whole workingclass movement. We cannot waste time. We cannot quibble. How can anyone underestimate this thing? But I feel an apathy in America, a failure to react to the events in Germany that is appalling. Forward to the united front! There need be no hypocrisy or ignoring of basic differences. Each party and each group can retain its individuality. But at once! Let us unite to fling back Hitlerism and crush it forever!"

"Without an understanding of the economic basis of war, no one can be its determined or effective opponent. Sentimental appeals will not hold back a nation inflamed by patriotic lies. Only the man who understands clearly that he is being asked to die for J. P. Morgan's investments abroad, or the markets of the oil and machinery trusts, will be immune to the customary lies about small nations, enemy atrocities, or democracy. That is why it is so necessary to spread a knowledge of Marxian economies; that is why it is so necessary to maintain a clear-cut Marxian platform in politics, based on the realities of the class war. Prepare for the next war! Prepare by studying Marx and Lenin, by studying the Russian Revolution. Prepare to fight Wall Street, instead of dying to protect its wealth. Inoculate yourself against the liberals who will want to lead you into another capitalist war for whatever holy and subtle reason. Prepare against the Walter Lippmanns, the Rabbi Stephen Wises, the Woodrow Wilsons, Spargoes, Bohns, Scheidemanns, Eberts, Kropotkins, Albert Thomases, Arthur Hendersons, of the next war. They are in your midst now; ask them what they will do, SPECIFICALLY, when the nation is mobilized. Prepare."

"To lead for the common good is to undermine the effectiveness of anti-Semitic propaganda."

"It is because the forces of national unity in this country, under the great social discipline of a just war, have grown so strong that they are in a position, together with the other United Nations, to administer the final crushing blows to Germany and Japan that the anti-Semites are resorting to the methods of desperation to disrupt this unity. We become really stronger; they become desperate and ferocious, but essentially weaker. Fascism itself has proved to be ferocious but unstable...let us not mistake their panic-stricken thrashings for real strength."

"The main principle of a democracy is that the rights of any one group, be it minority or majority, are connected with the rights of all groups."

"From the founding of our nation there has been a continual, many-angled struggle between these who would sacrifice the public need to their private wills and fortunes, and those who have fought to extend the boundaries of the public interest."

"the entire commercial press of our nation is not the "free" press it loudly claims to be that it is, rather, the principal means yet devised by the owners of the giant newspaper industry for dominating the public mind."

"The finance-capitalists who dominate American life are not Jews (Morgan, Rockefeller, DuPonts, Ford, etc.), and the number of Jewish proletarians has vastly increased. Yet, despite these facts, anti-Semitism has taken root in this country, and is now being organized on a greater scale than ever before. This organized anti-Semitism, furthermore, is more and more openly being used as a siphon to divert what are essentially anti-capitalist feelings among the people into channels that will serve only to fasten the hold of capitalism upon them, and capitalism, at that, in its most rabid, its fascist, form. The way to wipe out anti-Semitism coincides in large part, therefore, with the way to eliminate economic exploitation. And the way to wipe out the organized anti-Semitism that the American fascist forces are now fostering coincides with the way to check and crush fascism. Only socialism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, can eliminate the roots of anti-Semitism. And only the people's front, based on the trade unions and uniting the oppressed middle classes of city and country, can crush the fascists' attempt to organize anti-Semitism along lines of violence and vigilanteism. It is, therefore, very encouraging to note that practically all of the contributors to this symposium agree on these propositions: that anti-Semitism has economic roots, and can be uprooted only by some form of socialism; and that anti-Semitism now is a phase of fascism and must be fought as such, through unity with all progressive forces. It is noteworthy that all agree that the time has come to fight anti-Semitism, and considerable scorn is directed against those who preach passivity as a way of mollifying the anti-Semites."

"Sometimes we Jews are afraid to act openly either in behalf of others or in the specific resistance to anti-Semitism. Some of us are still ridden by the psychology of fear. We have a habit of "dignified" and "long-suffering" retreat. But there is more dignity and less suffering in moving forward to victory. We must decide which we fear more: the victory, of Hitler and the anti-Semites, or the struggle against fascism and anti-Semitism. Is there really a choice, when Hitlerism offers us literal extermination? It is hard to win an ally, or develop an alliance, when we are ourselves retreating. Those who themselves fight with full courage help others decide to join them in the battle. But what is this talk of retreat or advance? The real alternative is survival or annihilation. Nothing less."

"It helps one keep one's balance to remember that there are other important problems clamoring for action...just the other week one of my Negro neighbors had her brother come home, discharged from the Army for medical reasons. He told his sister something which helps me maintain a proper perspective and relative sense of values. Her brother had been stationed in Alabama. In this Army camp there was a group of war prisoners, Germans. On Saturday nights these German war prisoners, properly protected, of course, by guards, would be escorted to the Alabama town for an American Saturday night "in town." But the Negro troops stationed there were not allowed, either escorted or under their own power, to go to town in Alabama on a Saturday night. Since hearing this story I have been thinking that surely there is nothing that can be done to one man at Sing Sing, either in two years or a year and a half or in any time that you may commute the sentence to, that can be quite as vicious, quite as brutalizing, quite as demoralizing as that which almost a half million Negro soldiers face in the armed forces or that which so many millions face in civilian life that is not yet entirely civilized."

"As Marxists, we stress the need of bringing the mask for privilege and the mask for frustration into their proper relationship. In this way the ruling class can be shown to be exploiting those it frustrates by diverting their resentment onto a scapegoat who is innocent of frustrating them and whose sacrificial slaughter, therefore, cannot release them from their frustration."

"An active conscience is a formidable thing."

"Words must be backed by deeds."