The Naked Communist (22 page)

"The program (of the U.S. Communist Party) must be sanctioned by the regular congress of the Communist International."

"All decisions of the Communist International ... are binding upon all parties belonging to the Communist International (which would include the U.S. Communist Party)."

"The duty of spreading Communist ideas includes the special obligation to carry on a vigorous and systematic propaganda in the Army. Where this agitation is forbidden by exceptional laws, it is to be carried on illegally."

"Every party wishing to belong to the Communist International must systematically and persistently develop a Communist agitation within the trade-unions."

It was basic commitments such as these which led the U.S. Subversive Activities Control Board to make the following statement in 1953 after extended hearings:

"We find upon the whole record that the evidence preponderantly establishes that Respondent's leaders (leaders of the Communist Party, USA) and its members consider the allegiance they owe to the United States as subordinate to their loyalty and obligations to the Soviet Union."
⁴

Beginning April 28, 1919, a series of 36 bombs were discovered in the mails addressed to such persons as the Attorney General, Justice Holmes of the Supreme Court, J.P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller and similar persons of prominence. One of the bombs got through to the home of Senator Hardwick who had been trying to shut off the migration of Bolsheviks to the U.S. A servant opened the package and the bomb exploded, blowing off her hands.

On September 16, 1920, a large bomb was carried in a horse-drawn carriage to the corner of Broad and Wall Streets in New York City -- the vortex of American capitalism. The vehicle was brought to a halt across the street from the un-ostentatious three-story limestone building occupied by the firm of J.P. Morgan and Company.

Suddenly a great roar went up from the carriage, and blue-white flame shot into the sky. The bomb exploded with tremendous violence, killing thirty people outright and injuring hundreds more. It wrecked the interior of the Morgan offices, smashed windows for blocks around and shot an iron slug through a window on the thirty-fourth floor of the Equitable Building.

These acts of murder and violence created a blistering resentment against the Bolsheviks in every part of the United States. Occasionally counter-violence was used by aroused citizens in retaliation. Numerous arrests were made by the Attorney General and finally a whole shipload of Bolshevik aliens and Communist leaders were deported to Russia via Finland on the S.S. Buford. Aboard the boat was the notorious Emma Goldman whose anarchist speeches a quarter of a century earlier had induced Leon Czolgosz to assassinate President McKinley. Little did she know that in twenty-four months she would not only repudiate Lenin and his Bolsheviks but that by 1940 her great last hope would be to die in the United States.

Few names among Communist leaders today are better known to the American public than the name of William Z. Foster. He was a charter member of the party in the United States and was the person designated by the party to take over the U.S. labor unions. Most of the money for the campaign came from Moscow where the Profintern (Red International of Trade Unions) had received $1,000,000 from the Soviet Government to help spread Communism in the labor unions of other nations.

Foster's drive hit the labor front soon after the armistice, when the workers were already in a state of agitation resulting from wartime conditions. Foster found little difficulty in sparking strikes in several important industries and even where he had nothing to do with a strike he was often given the credit. As a result, many people began to identify their pro-labor sympathies with Communism without completely realizing it.

The coal miners were believed to have come under Foster's influence when they voted enthusiastically to have the coal industry nationalized and a similar label seemed to attach itself to the steel strike because Foster was very much in evidence as an agitator and promoter of the strike. Many people knew that both the coal miners and the steel workers had many legitimate reasons for striking and to them the fact that Foster and his Communist associates seized this opportunity to worm their way into the labor movement seemed of little importance.

But William Z. Foster never really concealed his fundamental ambition to overthrow the United States government by violence and subordinate the American laborer (as well as every other American) to the mandates of a Communist dictatorship copied after the Russian pattern. In fact, Mr. Foster visualized himself as the coming dictator. He was the Communist candidate for President on two occasions and wrote a book called
Toward Soviet America
, telling just how the Communists would take over.

When a Congressional committee placed him under oath and asked him about Communism, he was voluble and frank:

The Chairman: "Do the Communists in this country advocate world revolution?"

Mr. Foster: "Yes."

The Chairman: "Do they (the Communists) advocate revolution in this country?"

Mr. Foster: "I have stated that the Communists advocate abolition of the capitalist system in this country and every other country...."

The Chairman: "Now, are the Communists in this country opposed to our republican form of government?"

Mr. Foster: "The capitalist Democracy -- most assuredly."

The Chairman: "What you advocate is a change of our republican form of government and the substituting of the soviet form of government?

Mr. Foster: "I have stated that a number of times."

The Chairman: "Now, if I understand you, the workers in this country look upon the Soviet Union as their country; is that right?"

Mr. Foster: "The more advanced workers do."

The Chairman: "They look upon the Soviet flag as their flag?"

Mr. Foster: "The workers of this country and the workers of every country have only one flag and that is the red flag."

The Chairman: "... If they had to choose between the red flag and the American flag, I take it from you that you would choose the red flag, is that correct?"

Mr. Foster: "I have stated my answer."

The Chairman: "I don't want to force you to answer if it embarrasses you, Mr. Foster."

Mr. Foster: "It does not embarrass me at all. I stated very clearly the red flag is the flag of the revolutionary class, and we are part of the revolutionary class."
⁵

From 1921 to 1924, members of the Communist Party sought to avoid arrest by operating underground, but when the wartime emergency acts were repealed the Communist leaders gradually surfaced again and continued their campaign for a revolution to overthrow the United States government.

However, during the next few years the general psychology of the country was not particularly security conscious. It was an era of fads, frivolity and general post-war frenzy. The national scene was entirely too prosperous and intoxicating to worry about a few fanatic-minded men who wanted to rule the world. Somehow or other the word "Communist" began to have a far-away flavor, and people jokingly spoke of the former years of bomb-throwing, strikes, arrests and deportations as the days of "the great Red scare."

However, a fertile field for future Communist conquests was being developed among the very people who feared it least. The United States was going sophisticated in an atmosphere of half-baked intellectualism. Pedestals of the past crumbled to the cry of scandal and the rattling of closeted skeletons. An age of daring debunking had arrived. At the time few people realized that the economic and spiritual collapse toward which the nation was drifting would produce an intellectual revolt that would permit the agents of Communism to propel them into every echelon of American society -- including some of the highest offices of the United States Government. This brings us to the story of Whittaker Chambers. Because Chambers was converted to Communism during this period and worked himself up to the highest levels of intrigue as a leader of Russian espionage, his disclosures give a sweeping panoramic picture of the growth of Communism in the United States from 1925-2938.

A brief review of Whittaker Chambers' conversion to Communism will perhaps reveal an evolutionary pattern which was followed by a considerable number of young American intellectuals during the Nineteen-Twenties and early Thirties.

Whittaker Chambers was raised on Long Island not far from suburban New York. In the Chambers home was an impersonal and disinterested father (a newspaper illustrator), an over-loving and therefore overbearing mother (who had formerly been an actress), an insane grandmother and a younger brother toward whom Chambers felt no particular fraternal affection.

Both Chambers and his younger brother came to maturity during the hectic post-war period and, like many people of their time, both became moral and spiritual casualties. Chambers' younger brother returned from college cynical and disillusioned. He became an alcoholic and finally committed suicide. The whole family seemed to have degenerated into a pattern of life which was precisely the mess of purposeless Pottage that Marx and Engels had declared it to be. Whittaker Chambers describes his own experiences as follows:

"When I entered (college shortly after World War I) I was a conservative in my view of life and politics, and I was undergoing a religious experience. By the time I left, entirely by my own choice, I was no longer a conservative and I had no religion. 1 had published in a campus literary magazine an atheist playlet.... The same year, I went to Europe and saw Germany in the manic throes of defeat. I returned to Columbia, this time paying my own way. In 1925, I voluntarily withdrew for the express purpose of joining the Communist Party. For I had come to believe that the world we live in was dying, that only surgery could now save the wreckage of mankind, and that the Communist Party was history's surgeon."
⁶

Chambers went to work for Communism in real earnest. He became co-editor of
The Textile Worker
, wrote for the
Daily Worker
, took a Communist "wife" and learned the strike tactics of trade union violence. He writes that during this period, "I first learned that the Communist Party employed gangsters against the fur bosses in certain strikes.... I first learned how Communist union members would lead their own gangs of strikers into scab shops and in a few moments slash to pieces with their sharp-hooked fur knives thousands of dollars’ worth of mink skins."
⁷

It was his intention to make the Communist program the permanent pattern of his life. Before long, however, his Communist "wife" left him to go her own way and Chambers felt it would be more to his liking to make his next union (which took place in 1931) an official "bourgeois marriage" at some city hall. At this stage, Chambers would never have guessed that he also had other sensibilities which would one day take him out of Communism and make him senior editor of Time magazine at a salary of around $30,000 per year!

In 1928, Chambers saw the first series of purges in the American Communist Party. For several years, the party had been dominated by Charles E. Ruthenburg, "the American Lenin." When Ruthenburg suddenly died there was a mad scramble for power. Jay Lovestone came out on top with William Z. Foster representing a small, noisy minority. But soon Lovestone made a serious political mistake. He sided with one of Stalin's most powerful Russian opponents. Nikolai Bukharin, who stood for a less violent program than Stalin had in mind.

Lovestone and William Z. Foster were summoned to Moscow. When they returned, Lovestone was a broken man. He had been called a traitor by Stalin and thrown out of the party. Stalin had named Foster the heir to the throne. The next step was to force every member of the party in the United States to support Foster's radical program or be expelled. Most Communists picked up the new set of signals from Moscow and immediately swore allegiance to Foster. But not so with Chambers. It looked to him as though Stalin were behaving exactly like a Fascist dictator by forcing the majority of the American Communists to follow leadership they had already voted against. Chambers stopped being active in the party.

For two years, by his own choice, Chambers remained outside the regular ranks. He was never expelled, nor did his loyalty to Communism change, but he deeply resented Stalin. The entire situation was changed, however, by the great depression. Chambers' sympathies for the unemployed once more drew him back toward the party program. He also felt forced to admit that from all appearances the long-predicted collapse of American capitalism had arrived.