That was the year the Socialist Party split on the ques-
tion of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Communist In-
ternational.
Out of the Party's left wing, which Ruthen-
berg helped to organize, there grew two separate communist
parties. The government's reply to the beginning of the
communist movement in America was a series of raids on
both parties in all sections of the country. Eventually At-
torney General Palmer boasted that ten thousand workers
were arrested in those raids; four thousand of them were in
prison at one time. Leaders of both communist organizations
-among them Ruthenberg,
who was now in New York-
were indicted under various "criminal
syndicalism" and
"anarchy" laws. This mass terror against the revolutionary
workers launched by the democratic and idealistic Woodrow
Wilson in the interest of the propertied classes had its effect:
the young communist groups were crippled.
They were
compelled to organize an underground movement in which
Ruthenberg played a leading role. Illegal life cut the two
parties off from the mass of American workers; they became
sectarian and sterile; their chief activities were internal
party propaganda, conflicts between the two parties, debates
about abstract theoretical points. Ruthenberg was among
those who favored bringing the communists into open con-
tact with the workers. He had begun to elaborate plans in
this direction when he was put on trial under his New York
indictment,
convicted, refused bail and imprisoned in Sing
Sing. During his imprisonment,
the two underground parties
united and by the end of 1921 organized the open Workers
(Communist)
Party.
Shortly afterward,
Ruthenberg was
released from prison and the legal party made him its
secretary.
This was the abstract picture I had of Ruthenberg when
I met him in the fall of 1922. I was surprised to find him
a tall, suave, handsome man, under forty, dressed in neat
-grey tweeds and a white starched collar. There was no
"proletarian" pose about this proletarian revolutionary,
that
is, nothing bohemian. His desk, facing a window that looked
out on Broadway and Eleventh Street, was orderly, as was
the bookcase in which he kept the writings of Marx and
Lenin. His long narrow face with its large forehead and
prominent nose was fair and pink; when he smiled his bright
blue eyes became narrow slits. I never heard him raise his
voice in conversation; he always spoke calmly and method-
ically. On several occasions he explained the Communist Par-
ty to me. At my request he wrote an article on the subject
which I published in the
Liberator.
In his article, Ruthen-
berg said:
In the three years that have passed since the open Communist
convention of 1919, the Communist movement in this country has
undergone a transformation ....
It does not expect to convert the
workers to a belief in the Soviets ana the Dictatorship of the
Proletariat
by merely holding up the example of European ex-
perience. Its campaigns and programs of action are based upon
the actualities of the life of the workers in the United States.
The Party was becoming realistic. It was a section of the
inter~ational
revolutionary movement operating on the na-
tional terrain out of which it sprang, in which it was rooted.
Just now it was agitating the slogans of working within
the conservative trade unions, of organizing a iJnited front
of the workers, a Labor Party in the United States.
The Library
SAUL LEVITT
EIGHTEENTH STREET,
an iron desert; down on the
ground floor, at the stand, where he sipped fizz water, wip-
ed his face, he could hear the hum of wheels, a vibration
through the old buildings whose floors supported tons of
machinery,
for weaving and printing.
And the freight
elevators, hydraulic, with men pulling at a cable for start-
ing and stopping. A clanging everywhere, in the machinery
shops, on the streets. The hand trucks in the gutters got stuck
in the soft macadam. On the noon hour men and boys came
down, to stand around in the shadow of the back entrances,
watching the girls go by.
Walking through these streets he found work again for
the rest of the summer on the tenth floor of an old, grumb-
ling, vibrating pile of brick and iron on eighteenth.
All day he walked around a machine whose propellors
twined silk and cotton into a cording. Cotton on a back-
board, silk on little prongs, all the ends converging through
an eye, and if you closed your eyes and put your hands on
the strands you felt them twisting in your hand, caressing
and rubbing the hand, silk caressing, cotton fibres catching
the hand.
There were thirty machines on the floor, making the
cording, all of them painted green, a bright green, and these
big, green fellows going together made the most terrific
racket he had ever heard in his life, deafened him slightly for
the time that he worked there; getting the job on a Monday,.
after eight, coming up to that roa'ring tenth floor, he could
hear its thunder down on the third floor, feel it in the
elevator, and when the door opened on the tenth it hit him
in one great wave of sound. The big, green fellows all going
together, the bobbins jiggling and dancing.
Afterwards it was easier. He was able to say to Ida after
three days, "I'm used to it." He had never told them why
he quit Stone's. He thought it would sound crazy to tell
them that he was through there, no use staying there any-
more.
He got used to that roar, it got so that he didn't even
mind it at all, only that when he went down to the street
-that
was the strange place, so quiet with trucks grinding
and people yelling. Eight to five-thirty; tending a machine,
forty minutes for lunch-the only time you really talked
on the job, when you went downstairs and sat on a stool at
the "Busy B" counter for a frank and soda. But not too
much talk on the job, no u~e trying to talk, the noise was dis-
couraging; so you just floated along in the sea of sound, not
even hearing it, and you learned the little tricks of the trade.
The boy on the next machine told him if he wanted to
get away for a minute he could cut the half-finished spools
of silk and cotton and get full ones in the stockroom; you
put them on, and then faded off into the washroom,
and
shut the door and lit a butt. God
I
Heaven, sitting on the
bowl and reading last week's
News,
smoking a cigarette.
Talking to the other fellows in the washroom, looking out
FEBRUARY,
193
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