members-of-the-communist-party-usa

"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."

"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."

"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!"

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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."

"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.""

"Lack of labor unity in Germany-for which the leaders of the Social-Democratic Party were primarily responsible, just as the leaders of the A. F. of L. are chiefly to blame for the division in our own labor movement-made possible the triumph of fascism through the duping of the middle classes and farmers In France and Spain, on the other hand, labor unity was the foundation on which was built the People's Front alliance of workers, farmers, and small business and professional people, through which the road was blocked to fascism. In our own country, the A. F. of L's executive council, by extending the split into the political field, is greatly increasing the danger of a reactionary victory. A united labor movement would overnight become a powerful attracting force for the farmers and middle classes and would help stiffen the spines of the faint-hearted New Dealers and progressives in Congress."

"in advanced capitalist countries the party of the proletariat, as well as the cultural movement of the proletariat, goes forward not through alliance with the liberals, but in irreconcilable struggle against them. Our allies are those who, breaking with treacherous bourgeois liberalism, seek their way, however falteringly, toward the world of all power to the workers. These, still filled with many of their bourgeois prejudices, require not sermons and decrees, not "Communist snobbery", as Lenin called it,but a personal approach and comradely guidance. And let us remember that these new allies are coming not merely to the proletarian literary movement, which in this country is at present very weak, but to the knowledge, the experience, the revolutionary clearsightedness and intransigence of a movement that is international in scope, that sets itself heroic goals embracing every field of human activity."

"every issue, no matter how small, the bipartisan tory coalition saw one fundamental issue: who shall control the nation's destiny the handful of Wall Street monopolists or the masses of the people?"

"The future is the child of the present."

"the pipers of reaction, despite themselves, also perform a positive function. Their diagnosis is wrong, their remedies are dangerous, they are quacks and shameless hypocrites, but they call attention to the fundamental maladies of our day. Certainly the New Dealers have no cause to be holier-than-thou. Without the New Deal and its trail of broken promises, there might never have been the Share-Our-Wealth Clubs and the Union for Social Justice. This is election year, but the question of which is the bigger and better circus cannot forever blot out the question of bread. There is an awakening in the land, and pipers of a new day are arising in the thousands of men and women who are moving toward farmer-labor action against threatening disaster. Therein lies the hope of America."

"Let us not be blind to our own India: the Negro people. The two situations are not entirely identical, but it is a question whether the differences are in our favor. Though there has been improvement, can it be maintained that the treatment still accorded our 13,000,000 black fellow-Americans doesn't hurt both the war and the peace?"

"One would imagine that those who write about Communist theory would trouble to learn something about it."

"The future will not be fashioned by a few individuals, no matter how gifted, sitting down and cutting ingenious patterns, nor even by the efforts of governments alone. It is being fashioned by the action of the peoples of all countries, by their blood and sweat-yes, and by their vision too. The middle-class men and women of America have every reason not to permit themselves to be diverted away from this historic mainstream by illusory schemes and plans that have no roots in life; on the contrary, every consideration of the present and future should impel them to join fully with their brothers and sisters of other classes, particularly of the working class, in the great liberating war that alone can bring a great liberating peace."

"the political situation in the past year and a half cannot be viewed in simple terms of growing strength of reaction. On the contrary, it is the strength of the democratic mass movement, the overwhelming Roosevelt victory in the 1936 election, and the tremendous growth and strike achievements of the C.I.O. that have caused the economic overlords to organise a widening offensive in an effort to halt and disrupt the legions of democracy. To defeat this offensive, to guarantee for our country "democracy-and more democracy," security, and peace, unity is needed, unity behind the recovery program, unity in the creation in every locality and on a national scale of a democratic front in the elections such as emerged with notable results in the last New York City campaign. The time is short in which to achieve this unity, but it is not yet too late."

"What the liberals who advocate that the United States pursue the isolationist course desired by Hitler, Mussolini, the Mikalo, Chamberlain, and our own Hearsts and Coughlins fail to understand is that domestic and foreign policies are essentially a unit. The aggressions and banditry of the fascist dictatorships in their relations with other countries are the external expression of the policy of enslavement and terror at home."

"The recent history of international Social-Democracy, both "left" and right, demonstrates that there is no middle-of-the-road between reform and revolution, that Communism, the Communism of the Communist International and its sections throughout the world, offers the only way out of the ghastly blind-alley of capitalism for all producers of hand and brain."

"Morris U. Schappes embodied an amazing combination of stubbornness and open-mindedness, historical consciousness, and future vision. His dedication to this magazine was fierce and sacrificial, and he cultivated tremendous enthusiasm and loyalty among its readers by dint of his honesty, his analytical powers, and his consistent dedication to progressive ideals."

"I wish your Honor or deputies of your Honor could have gone into the college halls and gotten some of the men, some of the men who are not in any way connected with this particular situation, gotten them to describe the atmosphere now. It is what it was in 1928, where, in the faculty dining room, intelligent men did not discuss intelligent things, because they did not dare, your Honor. They discussed road maps, roads, the weather, because there was no confidence that if they discussed more serious things, whether they should be Democrats or Republicans for instance, that it might not redound to their academic disadvantage. In more recent years, the faculty, as a whole, has faced its own problems more courageously. It has given freer rein to its ability, to its intellectual curiosity, expressed its conviction. Now a pall, an intellectual pall, is settling upon the college. People do not want to be seen speaking to other people, although they are personal friends, for fear that somebody will say, "Well, so and so doesn't talk to the right people about the right things." That is not an atmosphere in which a college can flourish. My sympathy goes out to the students who have to sit before teachers who will be afraid to answer questions that will be put to them-because the students will put questions and the teachers will be afraid to answer them, not often because they do not know the answers, but because they do. Is that an atmosphere in which a college-the largest municipally supported college in the world-can such a college flourish in such an atmosphere?"

"Our schools are being attacked. I hope that changed tempers and changed atmospheres, changes which, perhaps, we had little to do with, will have some bearing. There was a time when the President of our country rebuked the Dies committee for what he called its "sordid procedure." There was a time when the President of the Board of Higher Education rebuked the Dies committee for its attacks on the College. I hope the times are becoming favorable for similar truthful and courageous observations of opinion on the functioning of the Rapp-Coudert committee"

"Some men buckle under these pressures; some men and women will do anything-perhaps not understanding the consequences, not sufficiently understanding them-to realize what it is that is forcing them in this direction. They will do anything for security. They will do anything for a permanent position when they are hanging on by the skin of their teeth year after year, teaching three courses in the evening session, and so on."

"In his column, “The Editor’s Diary,” Morris developed a very intimate journalistic voice in which he reported on books, plays, films and events in the progressive Jewish movement and engaged in several noteworthy controversies, including a spirited historical defense of American Jewish responses to the Holocaust and several fascinating commentaries about solidarity and tensions between American Jews and African Americans."

"the war makers have tried for more than a year to persuade the American people and the American college student to become enthusiastic targets in the war, and, having failed, must now resort to extraordinary methods of intimidation and terror."

"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."

"Such students and such teachers are obviously to be regarded as a menace to reaction and its domestic and foreign policy. They have no great enthusiasm for the war. Too many of them have the habit of thinking independently, of acting in concert, of valuing democracy as a way of living rather than as a way of talking. They are organized. Any fascist, any open-shop saboteur of democracy, any labor spy could write a plan of attack for reaction, given this situation. Red-bait. Attack the union as Red-dominated. Use a few "liberals" to lend respectability to the smear. Gag the students by preventing them from hearing speakers of their own choice. Fire some of the most active teachers and trade unionists. Scare the rest. If they don't scare that easily, pin a criminal charge on one of them; if the others still don't scare, at least the charge will shake off the fence onto the side of reaction some who still stubbornly said the issue was academic freedom. These are the tactics, these are the slogans, this is the reasoning laid bare-of growing American fascism trying to coordinate its free school system."

"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."

"Words must be backed by deeds."

"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."

"I studied the students' problems; I did not try to suggest solutions; I tried only to have them develop courage and confidence in the fact that our people, who have solved so many problems, can solve this one, too."

"Anti-Semitism has become a major issue for the American people, and for all democratic mankind. In the pattern of imperialist reaction, anti-Semitism today looms ever larger, not only alongside of anti-Communism, anti-Sovietism, anti-unionism, anti-alienism, and anti-Negroism, but in a kind of special relationship to these other elements: Negroes, aliens, union men, the Soviets, and Communists are all in some degree tarred by reaction as Jewish or as the dupes of the Jews. Every reactionary movement today is itself anti-Semitic, or is allied with anti-Semites; on the other hand, the more consistent a progressive movement is, the more it makes the fight against anti-Semitism a prominent part of its program of action. No anti-Semite can be in any sense progressive now; no progressive can for any reason compromise with anti-Semitism."

"I have seen the union transform individuals, your Honor, young men, middle-aged men, who had been very good teachers, very good scholars, who apparently had abilities that were never to be realized within the academic walls. Not everybody could become the head of a department and exhibit his administrative ability. Here in the union they became executives; they became committee members; they began to learn how to work together, and in a college it is important because scholarship in our community sets a price upon individuality, not so much upon cooperation with others. They began to learn how to work together, how to argue things out, how to settle differences, rise above individualities and beyond pettiness. I was not the only one that noticed character change, character development and growth; that, of course, had its effect upon every relationship these men went into, whether it was in the classroom, at a department meeting, or outside in public life."

"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."

"An active conscience is a formidable thing."

"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."

"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."

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

"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."

"Εducation is a war industry. Teachers, especially those involved in higher education, produce a direct war material. Our product is not the cannon, or the shell, or the dive bomber, or the dreadnaught. Ours is the even more basic material-the target. Without the target, the soldier on land, sea, or air, no war could get to the shooting stage."

"the capitalist press boiling everything in the timely caldrons of hysteria"

"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."

"Writing in 1982 about his time in prison in the 1940s, Morris described his determination, “as a way of fighting the system, to make the most of my time there, because if there is anything I hate it is to waste time — our most precious possession...I had valued democracy, democratic rights, before I was imprisoned. I was one of those who took almost literally Lenin’s hyperbolic cry that ‘Socialist democracy is a thousand times more democratic than bourgeois democracy.’ I believed it as a True Believer. So not a thousand; let it be a hundred, or ten times. That it could turn out in practice to be less democratic than bourgeois democracy in countries calling themselves socialist... was an experience that came late and sadly. If my vision of socialism now stresses democratic rights, forms and institutions as the essence of socialism, my prison experience laid a basis for a perception that was slowly, slowly, to mature.""

"According to traditional Marxist theory housewives were problematical as to their class consciousness; they often were unreliable allies of radical men. They were usually grouped with peasants and intellectuals as a potentially conservative drag line on the forward march of proletarian men. Women's equality was a stated goal of all Marxist movements, but the way women's issues were treated, one got the clear message that what women did was marginal to the struggle, unless they excelled at doing it the way men did. The great and celebrated heroines-La Pasionaria, Mother Bloor, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Clara Lemlich did not organize housewives; they organized female factory workers, women's auxiliaries or men."

"A Ukrainian immigrant and lifelong radical, Lemlich had moved to New York City in 1903 and led her coworkers at various factories out on strikes between 1906 and 1909. She, like Rose Schneiderman and many others of her time, was one of the early U.S. labor movement's revolutionary "fiery Jewish girls" who would soon leave a mark in their new homeland's history books."