Some American
Communists
JOSEPH FREEMAN
[This is an excerpt from the authoT"s forthcoming book.
An American Testament,
which will appear
in
the spring.
This section refers to the narrator's contacts with the Amer-
ican Communist Party
in 1922,
when the
Liberator
was the
organ of the revolutionary 'writers and artists of this country.]
ALTHOUGH
The Liberator
was in no way officially con-
nected with the organized communist movement,
I fre-
quently went to Party headquarters to get material for
editorials, or to obtain an article from some member of the
Central Committee. In this way I became acquainted with
several leading communists, whom I had known only by
reputation.
Of Bill Dunne, we had heard a great deal as the hero of
Bloody Butte. He was a worker who had come into the com-
munist movement through direct struggle with the exploit-
ing class. For years he had been active in the copper-miners'
union and the Democratic Party of Montana.
He played
poker 'Yith Burt Wheeler and had been elected to the state
legislature on the Democratic ticket. For a long time Bill
had not seen the disparity between his politics and his trade
unionism. The open-shop drive which swept America after
the war disillusioned him. He published a paper for the
union; when the employers attempted to suppress it, he took
the printing press to an abandoned church. The mine-owners
sent armed thugs to seize the press by force. But Dunne and
his wife Marguerite had taken rifles with them. They kept
up a running fire until they drove off their attackers. By
the time they left Montana and came east, they were con-
vinced communists. Their experiences, combined with their
reading of revolutionary literature,
had led them to believe
that communism alone offered a solution for the American
workers, as for workers in all countries.
This was the story I had heard about Dunne when I be-
gan to meet him frequently, in the fall of 1922 and in the
following spring, at Party headquarters,
at John's restau-
rant on East Twelfth Street, at the
Liberator
office. He was
short and stocky, with a tremendous barrel-chest, solid as a
rock, and a dark, heavy, Irish face. His close-cropped bullet
head and thick neck gave him the appearance of great physical
power; and his deep, husky voice, pouring out a flood of
rhetoric, witty and incisive, revealed a mind that was at
once brilliant and too fanciful for a practical politician. 'His
whole body, built like a retired prizefighter's,
shook with
repressed laughter when he told an anecdote. Dunne's read-
ing was wide, ranging from Lenin to Joyce. On the platform
he thundered in the style of the nineteenth-century orators,
and his articles in the Party press were florid, colorful and
full of acid.
22
Dunne's chief interest was the trade union movement.
The Party was then setting its face against dual unionism
and had raised the slogan of "boring from within" the con-
servative unions. Dunne was carrying out th':lt policy in the
American Federation of Labor, of which he was still a
member.
Occasionally he dined in the Village with the
Liberator
crowd, with whom he felt a certain affinity as a frustrated
man of letters. He had the traditional Irish poetry in him,
and wanted to write some day, if only an autobiography.
Until then he would content himself with the next best
thing-talking about literature.
Yet his contempt for the
literary trifles of bohemia was boundless. Himself strongly
sensuous and full of the love of life, he derided intellects
dribbling their power away on the abstractly erotic. Good
literature in our day, he said, could arise only out of the
class war. He often used the word "intellectual" as a term
of contempt, as I had heard Louis Smith use it in the 'slums
a decade earlier. This time, however, I understood that what
the communist organizer scorned was not intellect-which
Lenin, for example, had to the degree of genius-but
the
phony arrogance of the bohemian literati who fancied they
had a monopoly on brains and knowledge, whereas they ac-
tually understood nothing of the essential struggles of (Jur
epoch. There was this paradox, too; the intellectuals in the
Party pretended to be interested only in the working class;
Dunne, himself a worker, was also interested in the intel-
lectual.
I first met William Z. Foster through Louis Smith, and
was pleased that he who had first introduced me to com-
munism in boyhood should now introduce me to the chief-
tain of the great steel strike and an outstanding Party leader.
A worker by origin, the product of stockyard,
street-car,
factory and ship, Foster looked more like an intellectual
than most professors I had met. His thin, wiry body was
surmounted by a large head which rose from a round, strong
chin to a broad forehead and temples enlarged by baldness.
His clear blue eyes were by turns austere and' mild, his
voice soft. Foster talked only about the class war. His ques-
tions about my European life ignored art and literature, Dada,
the Rotonde,
fa vie de boheme.
These did not exist for him.
He wanted to know about the trade unions, the growth of
the communist movement,
international
politics. Anything
he said about himself was a parenthetical
illustration of a
general law of revolutionary strategy or a trade union prin-
ciple.
"That's no good," he would say about some suggestion.
"I tried that in the Chicago stockyards, and it doesn't work."
Then, merely to clarify his point, he would tell his ex-
periences in .organizing the stockyard workers.
More per-
sonal characteristics emerged. by accident. When we had
dinner in a Third Avenue cafeteria, I discovered that Foster
neither smoked nor drank, and that he was a vegetarian. But
he had no puritanical precepts on these matters. The prob-
lems of personal conduct which agitated us in the Village
did not interest him. He was ascetic by a standard which
determined all his actions. The class-struggle was the most
important
thing in the world,
and for that struggle he
FEBRUARY,
1936
