THE LIFE OF THE PARTY
Bring American Communists Out of the Shadows — and Closets
By David Bacon
Jacobin, 8/15/24
https://jacobin.com/2024/08/communists-san-francisco-lgbt-race
In the 20th century, American Communist Party members were
portrayed as the Red Menace, an enemy within. In reality, they were ordinary
people with extraordinarily complex intellectual, political, social, and
romantic lives that deserve to be chronicled.
Communist Party USA members participate in a demonstration
for unemployed relief during the Great Depression in San Francisco, California.
(Bettmann / Getty Images)
Review of San Francisco Reds: Communists in the Bay Area,
1919–1958 by Robert Cherny (University of Illinois Press, 2024) and Communists
in Closets: Queering the History 1930s–1990s by Bettina Aptheker (Routledge, 2023)
When I was eight, two men in dark suits and fedoras stopped
me on my way home from Peralta Elementary School in Oakland, California. “We
want to talk to you about your parents,” they said. My mom and dad had warned
me this might happen and told me how to respond. “You have to talk with them,”
I said.
I don’t know if the FBI agents ever actually went to our
house. I doubt it. My parents had been visited before, and they told the agents
they had nothing to say. Talking wasn’t the point of stopping me anyway. It was
to send a message: You’re vulnerable. We can hurt you. Be afraid.
Fear was something I grew up with. It’s why I’m an Oakland
boy, not a Brooklyn boy. Our family left New York City the year the Rosenbergs
were tried. My dad, head of his printing and publishing union, was blacklisted.
We got in the car and drove across the country to the Bay Area, where he’d
found a job in the printing plant of the University of California. I was five.
Two years later, the Rosenbergs were executed.
For better or worse, my mother laughed when she told me
stories about those years. She’d been given the job of Alameda County organizer
for the Communist Party after they found an apartment in West Oakland. When she
had meetings with the party’s district organizer, Mickey Lima, they’d go out to
the end of the Berkeley fish pier, where they were sure they couldn’t be
overheard.
She was frustrated to leave New York. In the years before we
drove west, she’d begun teaching at the Jefferson School, a Marxist
adult-education school where the Communist Party held classes for its own
members and other left-wing activists. After teaching about children’s
literature (she eventually became a children’s librarian and author), “I was
finally tapped for a more prestigious political course,” she remembered in a
contribution to a collection of memories of senior radicals, Tribute
of a Lifetime. After World War II, she had been the editor of a party
newsletter on the “woman question” with Claudia Jones (“the most beautiful
woman I have ever met,” she called her). And so she became the Jeff School
teacher of this subject, as emotionally charged then as it is now.
In 1952 and 1953, my mother recalled, she was struggling
with her students and herself over how to teach it. “I had read extensively
from Engels to Simone de Beauvoir, but what good did it all do when an African
American woman accused me — quite rightly — of ignoring her life experience in
favor of book knowledge?”
She gave the course three times, the last time to a
disproportionate number of young men. “Their expressions and their remarks were
both aggressive and sheepish — a curious combination that I did not understand
at first. I finally discovered they had all been sent to my class by their
Communist Party clubs as a punishment for sexist remarks and behavior. I still
wonder how they turned out.”
A couple of months later, our family moved to California.
Betty Bacon was able to laugh, and teach what she believed,
even when it wasn’t popular among many party members. Yet at the same time she,
my father George, my brother Dan, and myself were all leaving the city, their
union had been destroyed in the purge of the Congress of Industrial
Organizations. In those years, party leaders were already in federal prison and
more were on trial. Staying meant potentially being called before a committee,
getting arrested, or worse.
The lives of most people who were in the Communist Party are
unknown to social-justice activists today. The Second Red Scare and ensuing
secrecy have hidden not only the identities of party members but also the
quality and texture of the lives they led. Yet what they thought and did, their
day-to-day political work, how they socialized and maintained families, and the
ideas they tried to bring to an increasingly hostile society should be
important to us. They struggled with many of the same questions as organizers
for social change do today, and frequently had deep and meaningful discussions
about them that yielded profound insights. As my mother told me, “I can’t help
being annoyed at the casual assumption of some of today’s radical activists
that they invented the woman question.” Denying or forgetting this history
denies people fighting for social change today the ability to consider the
experiences and knowledge of those who’ve come before.
Two recent books help dissipate that cloud of secrecy: San Francisco Reds
by Robert Cherny and Communists
in Closets by Bettina Aptheker. Each presents important material that helps
us assess part of the US radical experience in ways we haven’t been able to
before.
Cherny’s San Francisco Reds focuses on the history of the
Communist Party in San Francisco and its surrounding area, which had a profound
impact on the politics of California and the country. Aptheker’s Communists in
Closets discusses the history of gay and lesbian party members, revealing the
huge contradiction within a party that proposed radical social change while
maintaining some of the most backward homophobic and anti-woman prejudices.
Because Communists in Closets tells the stories of
individual people, often in great detail, it brings us closer to the actual
experience of belonging to the Communist Party. The book is in good part
Bettina Aptheker’s account of her own life in the party, and her increasing
difficulty reconciling the politics she was raised with and her growing
awareness of her own sexual identity. It also profiles several other gay and
lesbian party members, highlighting their courageous commitment to radical
social change, and often the pain and tragedy the contradiction brought to
their personal lives.
Aptheker identifies with the fear that led many to stay in
the closet, and with the liberation at letting the world know who she really
is. Despite dwelling on very frustrating and painful experiences with
homophobia and party hypocrisy, Communists in Closets is a very loving book —
and one that makes Communist lives vastly more imaginable.
San Francisco Reds is a much more impersonal account,
painting a detailed portrait of the Communist Party through its presence in the
city. Cherny says in his preface that the book “takes a somewhat biographical
approach to political behavior, as I’ve followed nearly fifty individuals from
the time they joined the CP, through the party’s changing policies, to the
point when most of them left the party, and what they did afterward.” It too is
a notable contribution, helping fill in the parts of our memory that have been
erased.
Writing in the Blank Pages of History
Cherny moves back and forth between capsule biographies of
Communist Party members, using a few at a time to illustrate each turn, as he
sees it, in Communist Party policy. Several hint at historical phenomena that
could fill volumes in their own right. Some Californians, for instance, mostly
immigrants themselves, went back to the Soviet Union to start communal farms,
an experiment that lasted until the mid-1930s.
Colorful personalities from the party’s history make
appearances, from labor militant Mother Bloor to writer Bertram Wolfe. Rather
than recounting their personal experiences, however, Cherny presents them as
actors in the party’s efforts to craft and implement political directives
coming from the Communist International in the 1920s and ’30s, and in the
factional fighting that accompanied them. National characters loom large, like
William Z. Foster (labor organizer and later CP chairman) fighting with Jay
Lovestone (expelled CP leader and later the link between the Central
Intelligence Agency and the AFL-CIO) and then Earl Browder (longtime CP general
secretary expelled for dissolving the party in favor of a Communist Political
Association).
The Second Red Scare and ensuing secrecy has hidden not only
the identities of party members but also the quality and texture of the lives
they led.
San Francisco Reds documents the involvement of California
Communists in these fights. Some of the state’s leading reds, like William
Schneiderman, who headed the state party for two decades, were themselves
national players. Cherny describes in detail how national factional
disagreements were replicated in deep local divisions, sometimes paralyzing
political work. He presents the disagreements as largely personality-driven,
often using political theory or policy as a pretext for personal feuds. Those
he accuses of keeping those fights going, such as Harrison George, don’t come
off well.
One hero of Cherny’s account is Sam Darcy, described as a
talented organizer willing to put practical needs ahead of unworkable
directives. Darcy helped organize the largest farmworker strike in US history:
the 1933 cotton strike by the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial
Union (CAWIU), one of the industrial unions the party started as left-wing
alternatives to the conservative ones of that era. Growers shot down strikers,
and violence in the San Joaquin Valley reached terrifying levels, but workers
won pay increases, although not union recognition. The Communist Party grew
because it played a big role not just in planning and strategy but also in
providing food for thousands of striking families to eat, building tent cities,
and freeing people from the clutches of racist sheriffs and courts.
The next year Darcy was in San Francisco, where he mobilized
party members to support longshoreworkers as they fought one of the critical
battles that built the CIO. The entire city struck for three days when police
fired on strikers in their effort to herd strikebreakers onto the piers to
unload the paralyzed ships.
Cherny presents Darcy as the reality-based organizer locked
in conflict with doctrinaire functionaries, such as Harrison George, whose long
critical diatribes to party headquarters in New York are quoted in the book.
Yet Darcy was a functionary too, and both before and after the two strikes
spent time in Moscow at the Comintern offices trying to create an international
structure for Communist activity.
Two of Cherny’s other heroes are Louise Todd and Oleta
O’Connor Yates. Both San Franciscans are largely forgotten now, but their names
were familiar to thousands of city residents for two decades. They were
Communists who repeatedly ran for supervisor and other public offices. Much of
Cherny’s analysis of party activity in the city is based on these campaigns —
how many votes they got and, by implication, the size of the party’s popular
base in San Francisco.
Cherny is a thorough researcher, and much of his material
comes from folders in the Russian state archives. The book includes discussions
in the Comintern, reports made by party officials, and polemics about the
general direction of the Communist movement. Two debates had a great impact on
California Communists. In one, the party discarded policies that led to
organizing left unions like the CAWIU, advocating instead a broad “Popular
Front” to oppose fascism. Party policy was based on the defense of the Soviet
Union — first as the socialist bulwark against fascism before World War II,
especially in Spain’s Civil War, and then when it negotiated a pact with Adolf
Hitler, and then finally as it was forced into an all-out war to defeat Nazism
(a war in which the Soviet Union lost 22 million people).
Much of Cherny’s book concerns how these debates played out
in the political life of San Francisco Communists. While defending the Soviet
Union and existing socialism as they saw it, most party members found reasons
to excuse news of the purge trials of revolutionaries in the 1930s and the
development of Joseph Stalin’s dictatorship and the network of prison camps.
Cherny quotes Peggy Dennis, a national leader who lived (and left a son) in
Moscow, and was married to CPUSA general secretary Gene Dennis: “We cannot
claim that we did not know what was happening. We knew that the Comintern had
been decimated. . . . It was as though we could not trust ourselves to open
that Pandora’s box.”
As Ed Bender, who organized unemployed councils and then
fought in the Spanish Civil War, explained in Tribute of a Lifetime:
In the beginning I was very inspired by the Soviet Union.
They were building the new society. Over the years there has been some
disillusionment; but I still believe in socialism and a just society. The class
struggle is still here.
After hearing about Stalin’s repression in the 1956 report
by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Bender simply stopped attending party
meetings. Nevertheless, like many others, he continued to work as a
social-justice activist.
Keeping Pandora’s box closed meant giving no ground to the
government and media’s hostility toward and hatred of socialism — and, by
extension, the Soviet Union. That hard defense had roots in repression. San
Francisco Communists often spent time in prison, long before the McCarthy witch
hunts. Louise Todd, for instance, was indicted during the San Francisco general
strike for falsifying signatures on ballot petitions. At the federal prison in
Tehachapi, she joined Caroline Decker, who was jailed for leading the 1933
cotton strike. Although classified as “incorrigibles,” Cherny describes a
constant stream of visitors — not just other Communists, but socialist author
Upton Sinclair, journalist Anna Louise Strong, and even Hollywood celebrities.
Todd served thirteen months. Decker was let out after three years.
By the 1950s, that esprit was largely ground down by the
terror of committee hearings and Smith Act trials. Yet San Francisco reds
proved more flexible and politically savvy than their New York party
leadership. When the national party told key activists to go underground,
interpreting the moment as five minutes to a fascist midnight, California
disagreed. Oleta O’Connor Yates, Mickey Lima, and eight codefendants insisted
on defending the party’s legal right to exist. They mounted a strong defense at
their Smith Act trial in 1951, after national party leaders in New York had
refused to mount a defense and had gone to prison or underground.
Five years later, their appeal finally reached the Supreme
Court, and in 1957 their conviction was overturned. Dozens of others indicted
under the Smith Act in cities nationwide saw their charges dropped. By then the
party, which had 100,000 members during World War II, had been reduced to a few
thousand. The attrition could be attributed to the impact of McCarthyism, the
party’s own internal divisions, and the revelations about Stalin.
Cherny’s book is a necessary and revealing chronicle of the
life of the San Francisco party, but it’s not without omissions. Some of the
people who kept the party alive through this period and advocated for an open
presence, particularly Mickey Lima, are unmentioned.
Nor is there much description of the vibrant cultural life
of Communist painters, poets, and writers — particularly the influence of Diego
Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and the Mexican muralists, which held on in San
Francisco even through the Cold War. Likewise, the San Francisco Film and Photo
League, a group with strong left-wing activist credentials and party
connections via the New York Photo League, left a radical imprint on California
documentary photography that was felt for many decades. Cherny wrote a separate
biography of an important Communist in this movement, Victor Arnautoff and
the Politics of Art, and some of the history recounted there would help to
create a fuller picture here.
Finally, because Cherny relies so heavily in San Francisco
Reds on official documents, particularly reports in the party press and
archives or state archives in Moscow, he focuses on what they contain. He
details the factional fights extensively, but the
participation of party members in the mass movements of their times is
often hard to see. One result is a general absence of the experience of black
CP members, as well as immigrants and other people of color.
The Legacy of People of Color in the San Francisco Party
Black Communists were very visible and vocal in California,
and they played a fundamental part in the state’s Communist and labor
movements.
For example, William L. Patterson, born in San Francisco,
headed the International Labor Defense, which defended political prisoners for
several decades until the Civil Rights Congress took its place. Patterson’s
mother was a slave, and he worked his way through the city’s Hastings Law
College in part by labor on the railroad. He was arrested several times for
protesting the execution of Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, and went on
to defend other prisoners of racism and class war. In 1951, at the height of
Cold War terror, he and Paul Robeson presented a petition to the United Nations
documenting the history of lynching, titled “We Charge Genocide.” Like Robeson
and Dr W. E. B. Du Bois, Patterson’s passport was revoked in retaliation for
his political activity.
The friendship between poet Langston Hughes and William and
Louise Patterson, along with Matt Crawford and Evelyn Graves Crawford, is
documented in the collection Letters
From Langston. Their correspondence, collected by their daughters Evelyn
Crawford and MaryLouise Patterson, testifies eloquently to the vibrant cultural
life of African American reds. While the Pattersons, who moved around, don’t
appear in San Francisco Reds, the Crawfords, whom Cherny does discuss, became
stalwarts of the East Bay left.
Black Communists were very visible and vocal in California,
and they played a fundamental part in the state’s Communist and labor
movements.
Black Communists were leaders of the International Longshore
and Warehouse Union (ILWU), some openly Communist and some not. As a result of
the pact between the city’s African American community and longshore strikers,
the exclusion of black workers from most waterfront gangs ended after 1934.
Today ILWU Local 10 is a majority-black union. Communists played a part in
making it so, as well as integrating the longshore clerks’ Local 34.
Other leaders who briefly walk on and off Cherny’s stage
include Mason Roberson and Revels Cayton. But others don’t appear at all, like
Roscoe Proctor, a leader of black workers in the ILWU, or Alex and Harriet
Bagwell, who became beloved singers and music historians. Because their
activity is hard to see, their ideas about the relationship between African
American liberation and class struggle are absent too.
African Americans became Communists, MaryLouise Patterson
and Evelyn Crawford say, in part because “white and Black Communists were in
the streets and neighborhoods, fighting against evictions and racist violence —
especially in its most heinous form, lynching — not just talking about it on
the street corners or writing about it in their newspapers.” International
Labor Defense campaigns in San Francisco defended the Scottsboro youth in
Alabama and Angelo Herndon in Georgia. Even at the height of 1950s repression,
the Civil Rights Congress sent two white Bay Area Communists, Billie Wachter
and Decca Treuhaft, to the South to support Willie McGee, an African American
man falsely charged with rape and later executed. In Oakland, Bob Treuhaft,
Decca’s husband, stopped the execution of Jerry Newsom, another railroaded
black man, and won his freedom.
In his forward to Letters From Langston, historian Robin D.
G. Kelley posits the question of why the Pattersons and Matt Crawford chose
communism, and answers:
Because they believed that, through relentless global
struggle, another world was possible — one that was free of class exploitation,
racism, patriarchy, poverty and injustice. They thought that an international
socialist movement offered one of many possible paths to a liberated future.
Cherny does mention the remarkable life of Karl Yoneda, a
Communist born in California to Japanese immigrant parents. But he does not
mention the existence of other Japanese American Communists and radicals.
The absence of people of color in San Francisco Reds is
especially notable in relation to San Francisco’s Chinese community. Chinese
San Franciscans have a long history of Communist activity, which also deserves
acknowledgment.
The city’s legacy of violent racism toward Chinese people
goes back to its origins in the years of the gold fever, when immigrants came
from Guangdong province to work on railroads, drain the delta, and mine gold
before they were driven, along with the Mexicans, from the mines.
San Francisco was a base for organizers of the Chinese Revolution.
Sun Yat-sen, who planned the overthrow of the last Manchu empress and the
founding of the Chinese Republic in 1911, spent time in the city. He is honored
with a statue by radical sculptor Beniamino Bufano in St Mary’s Square. Like
radicals in other migrant communities, Chinese revolutionaries balanced efforts
to support the movement back home with organizing against virulent racism and
exploitation in the United States.
Chinese workers had a history of anarcho-syndicalism. In the
late 1920s, a
Chinatown branch of the Communist Party was organized, and it met until the
start of the Korean War. In the 1930s, the Chinese Workers Mutual Aid
Association was organized by laborers returning from the Alaska fish canneries.
It held classes in Marxism and published writings by leaders of the Chinese
Communist Party. Min Qing, the Chinese American Democratic Youth League, had
both men and women officers and spread radical ideas among students. The Chinese
Daily News and the Chinese Pacific Weekly were only two of the many newspapers
that promoted progressive community politics.
When the revolution triumphed in China in October 1949,
Chinese Communists in San Francisco organized a celebration with guests from
the ILWU and the California Labor School. It was attacked by forty right-wing
nationalist thugs. As the Cold War developed, Chinese leftists were hounded
by the FBI, while the Immigration and Naturalization Service launched a
campaign to terrorize the community, revoking the citizenship and
naturalization of hundreds of people. It focused especially on left activists.
At least two were deported. Four members of Min Qing were prosecuted for
immigration fraud, and in 1962 left-wing journalist and Min Qing member Maurice
Chuck was sent to prison.
One of San Francisco’s biggest Cold War trials was that of
William and Sylvia Powell and Julian Schuman. They published a magazine, China
Monthly Review, in China during the Korean War, listing the names of POWs and
exposing the use of chemical and germ warfare. In 1956, after they returned to
San Francisco, they were charged with treason. The government was forced to
drop the charges five years later.
Political and legal defense was always a big part of
Communist Party activity, including the defense against deportation. Cherny
describes the trials of ILWU founder Harry Bridges in his biography Harry Bridges: Labor
Radical, Labor Legend, but the party’s anti-deportation work was also
widespread. Though absent from San Francisco Reds, this work grew critical as
deportation became a key weapon in the government’s fight against Communists.
In 1933, the party helped to create the American Committee
for Protection of Foreign Born, which had its headquarters in New York. It
had an East Bay subcommittee and a Los Angeles office, and it provided
deportation defense throughout the Southwest. One celebrated case was that of
Lucio Bernabe, an organizer who went to work for the CIO’s Food, Tobacco,
Agricultural and Allied Workers union in the 1940s. After that union was
destroyed in the right-wing purge of the CIO, Bernabe became a leader of fruit
workers in the South Bay in ILWU Local 11. Immigration authorities accused him
falsely of entering the United States illegally, and his case ground on for
years.
Cherny’s tight focus on San Francisco (although broadened to
include the 1933 cotton strike in the San Joaquin Valley) means he doesn’t look
at the party’s activity in the counties surrounding the city, where Mexican and
Filipino farmworkers were concentrated. Those communities, however, also had a
strong presence in San Francisco itself.
In the late 1940s, party members participated in organizing
the Asociación Nacional México Americana (ANMA, or the National Mexican American
Association), a pioneering anti-racist and pro-labor group with chapters
throughout the Southwest. According to Enrique Buelna’s The
Mexican Question: Mexican Americans in the Communist Party, 1940–1957,
Mexican American members participated actively in forming the party, including
those in the left-led Union of Mine, Mill, and Smelter Workers. Party members
felt ANMA “would merge both the culture and heritage of the Mexican people with
the struggles for first class citizenship.”
According
to Bert Corona, ANMA’s organizer in Northern California, chapters brought
food and support to strikes by braceros in the exploitative contract labor
program for growers. Some braceros even organized chapters of their own, facing
inevitable deportation as a result.
The San Francisco chapter had three hundred to four hundred
families, and there were others in Richmond, Oakland, Hollister, Santa Rosa,
Napa, Stockton, and Watsonville. ANMA was put on the attorney general’s list of
subversive organizations, and its members eventually joined other
organizations, including the Community Service Organization led by Cesar
Chavez.
Omitting Mexicans and Latinos from San Francisco Reds
amounts to more than a lack of acknowledgment of certain people and
organizations. It’s a historical oversight, as sections of the Communist Party
in San Francisco were the products of the political development within those
communities, defined by immigration and national origin.
Justin Akers Chacón makes the case in Radicals
in the Barrio that a stream of radical, anti-capitalist thought and
activity among Mexicans in the United States extends back to the rebellions
following the War of Conquest of 1848. Anarchists and socialists organized the
Mexican Liberal Party in US barrios in the years prior to the Mexican
Revolution. The decision of many to organize in the US Communist Party was a
product of that political development and of the communist movement within
Mexico itself.
Akers Chacón criticizes the idea that Mexican farmworkers
were only interested in effective organization and not radical politics,
writing that they “had their own radical politics that did not have to be
taught by Communists, but rather were compatible.”
A similar process developed among the Filipino migrants who
came to the United States following the brutal colonial war of 1898, in which
the United States seized the Philippines. Abba Ramos, a Communist who worked as
an organizer for the ILWU, explains that
The manongs [a term of respect for older Filipinos] who came
in the 1920s were children of colonialism. They were radicalized because they
compared the ideals of the U.S. Constitution, and of the Filipinos’ own quest
for freedom, with the harsh reality they found here.
Ramos was born on a sugar plantation in Hawaii into a
radical union family. When FBI agents came to his parents’ home and told them
their union was led by Communists, “my father said ‘if winning better wages and
making us equal here is Communist, then we are too.'”
Ramos learned radical ideas from Filipino Communists, who
migrated between work in Alaska canneries and field labor in the fields of the
San Joaquin Valley. As Filipina historian Dawn Mabalon wrote,
“Many of the members of the Filipino union, the AWOC, were veterans of the
strikes of the 1920s, ’30s, and ’40s and were tough leftists, Marxists, and
Communists. They met the violence of the growers with their own militancy.”
Because it consisted of people who moved with the work,
their radical
network existed wherever they were. During part of the year, many lived in
San Francisco’s Manilatown. The militancy of the International Hotel housing
battle in the 1970s, perhaps the city’s most famous tenant uprising, owed to
the fact that it was the place where many manongs lived at the end of their
lives. This radical Filipino history is woven into the history of Communism in
San Francisco, but missing from San Francisco Reds.
Queering Communist Party History
Bettina Aptheker’s Communists in Closets takes a very
different approach to the Communist Party’s history. In recounting the lived
experience of gay and lesbian Communists, she gives a deep look into their
position in the party, and especially the way the development of their
political ideas interacted with their sexuality, open or closeted.
Aptheker’s book contains several shorter accounts that
support four long expositions describing the lives of four exceptional
individuals. This she combines with historical material about the party’s
denial of the existence of gay and lesbian people in its membership, especially
following the watershed Stonewall rebellion. During Stonewall and its aftermath,
young activists formed radical organizations like the Gay Activist Alliance,
debated emerging concepts of gay and lesbian liberation, and appealed for
support from the party. They were rejected with a stony silence.
Harry Hay began bringing gay Communists together, eventually
organizing the Mattachine Society, in which he tried to combine class politics
and gay identity.
Aptheker begins by describing her research process, heavily
dependent on the personal archives of her chosen subjects and oral histories
produced by herself and others. The tone of Aptheker’s book is more personal
than Cherny’s, as she references her own personal struggles and experiences in
coming out. She also expresses her love and admiration for the people she meets
through personal networks and through her research.
One smaller biographical vignette concerns Maud Russell, who
lived in China before joining the US party and returning to do political work.
Aptheker describes her long partnership with Ida Pruitt, who was born and lived
in China for many years herself. Aptheker can only speculate about whether they
were lovers. She judges Russell’s support for the violent Cultural Revolution
as a contradiction to her life of “loving and compassionate service.” However,
Aptheker adds, “I also know how many Communists, including myself, denied the
atrocities in the Soviet Union, for example, because of a blinding emotional
commitment to a political ideal that was not the reality. In my case, and
perhaps in Maud’s, this emotional need was connected to a secret lesbian
sexuality.” To live in the closet is to live in fear of exposure and social
ostracization. Perhaps that fear can enhance a person’s attachment to sources
of stability, security, identity, and belonging.
Other short biographies range from artist Elizabeth Olds,
about whose sexuality Aptheker again can only speculate, to composer Marc
Blitzstein, to Dr W. E. B. Du Bois’s adopted son David Graham Du Bois. More
contemporary figures include Victoria Mercado, who grew up in a Watsonville
farmworker family and worked on Angela Davis’s defense before her murder at
thirty. Marge Frantz grew up in the South, helped found the Civil Rights
Congress, and ended her life teaching with Aptheker and Davis at the University
of California at Santa Cruz. The book’s description of the eccentric living
arrangements between Frantz, her husband Laurent, a well-respected constitutional
lawyer, and her lover Eleanor Engstrand show that life for Communists and
former Communists could be as bohemian as any.
The book’s major contribution consists of four biographies:
Harry Hay, Betty Millard, Eleanor Flexner, and Lorraine Hansberry. The
intersection between Marxism and the politics of being gay in America is most
evident in her account of the radical politics of Harry Hay, whom she calls
“most decidedly a Communist revolutionary.”
Hay was a Communist Party activist through the 1930s and
’40s, joining street actions from the San Francisco general strike in 1934 to
the animator’s strike at Disney studios in 1949. He taught courses at the
California Labor School with titles like “Music . . . Barometer of the Class
Struggle” and “Imperialist Formalism.” And as the Cold War started, Hay began
bringing gay Communists together, eventually organizing the Mattachine Society,
in which he tried to combine class politics and gay identity.
Aptheker describes the political
theory Hay eventually elaborated, in which he asserted that gays and
lesbians were a “historically oppressed cultural minority,” as a concept that
evolved out of his educational work in the Communist Party. “There were no
women in the membership of the original Mattachine Society,” she notes, but
“the photographer Ruth Bernhard (1905–2006) often attended Mattachine meetings
and joined in their intense political discussions.” Bernhard, an open lesbian,
was a mainstay of gay and lesbian subcultural events and was widely celebrated
for her photographs of the female form.
Apetheker writes:
As a Marxist scholar of unusual innovation, Harry was trying
to argue that gay and lesbian people, because of their persecution and outsider
positioning, had the potential to develop a particular consciousness of
themselves that could also be a radical or revolutionary understanding of class
and racial oppression. . . . Hay thought that gays and lesbians as an oppressed
minority experienced the material conditions to make for a specifically gay
consciousness distinct from that of the dominant society, and that such a
consciousness held revolutionary implications.
Hay patterned this train of thought on the way the party had
come to define African Americans as a people who suffer racial and national
oppression, distinct from and in addition to their exploitation as workers. “He
thought such an oppositional gay consciousness had a culturally revolutionary
potential for upending all of society and its conventions.”
The Mattachine Society was a civil rights organization as
well, and mounted the first successful legal challenge to police entrapment of
gays and lesbians (with a lawyer from the National Maritime Union). In his
theoretical framework, Hay regarded entrapment as the “weak link” in the
capitalist oppression of his community. Neither the cases nor his expositions
got any coverage in the left press however. After organizing the Mattachine
Society and coming out as a gay man, Hay resigned from the Communist Party in
1951 because of its ban on gay membership. The party then expelled him to
prevent him from rejoining.
Betty Millard also, not without controversy, used the
analogy of black oppression in one of the Communist Party’s first attempts to
theoretically define the oppression of women. Millard wrote two essays in the
party journal New Masses, which were then published as a pamphlet called “Women
Against Myth.” In it, Millard sought to weave together a Marxist and
feminist analysis. “The way Betty structured her arguments,” Aptheker explains,
“also revealed what I would call a queer sensibility in that her lived
experiences as an independent woman and a lesbian, however closeted she was,
allowed her to see that ‘woman’ and ‘femininity’ and the constraints on women’s
lives were the purely (convenient) social constructions of male supremacy.
There was nothing natural about them.”
Millard began by deconstructing the way language
incorporates the inferior status of women. In using her essay for her course, I
can imagine the expressions on the faces of those sheepish young men as my mother
tells them that, when they curse with the word “fuck,” their expression of
anger and aggression has its roots in violence against women.
In “Women Against Myth,” however, Millard describes the
boredom of housewives as a “deadlier kind of lynching.” Claudia Jones
challenged her middle-class orientation, and Millard changed “deadlier” to
“quieter” but didn’t retract the comparison. Both Jones and Millard articulated
the triple oppression of black women through the intersecting systems of
domination: race, class, and gender. Jones wrote to Millard, “Does not the
inferior status stem now as in the past primarily from women’s relation to the
means of production?” Aptheker notes that Jones “did not include sexuality as a
key part of the system of domination.”
In 1949, amid this ferment, Louise Patterson organized a
national conference on “Marxism and the Woman Question” at which Jones was the
lead speaker. My mother’s courses in subsequent years must have followed and
been influenced by this debate. She idolized Jones, and used as a text her
clarion call “An
End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” Jones was indicted
under the Smith Act for writing another article, “Women
in the Struggle for Peace and Security,” imprisoned for a year in 1955, and
deported to the UK when she was released. Millard went on to represent the
Congress of American Women internationally, until it was destroyed in the
McCarthyite hysteria.
Aptheker describes in moving detail the emotional trauma and
roller-coaster experience of Millard and her other subjects as they try to come
to terms with their sexual orientation. Eleanor Flexner, who wrote the first
scholarly history of the woman suffrage movement in the United States, lived
with her lover Helen Terry “in real harmony and mutual enjoyment” for three
decades. Playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Aptheker says, “was encouraged,
nurtured and mentored by Black Communist artists and a collective of Black
Communist intellectuals and activists,” but nevertheless suffered paralyzing
depression and loneliness. Her liberation came with acknowledgment of her lesbian
sexuality.
In the book’s final section, the Communist Party finally
ends its ban on homosexuality. Aptheker presents contemporary portraits, for
example of Rodney Barnette, an activist in Angela Davis’s defense, a Communist
warehouse worker, and San Francisco’s first black owner of a gay bar. We also
meet Eric Gordon, who today reports on culture for People’s World, and Lowell
B. Denny III, who cofounded Queer Nation, a left-wing political movement that
took direct action to combat discrimination against gays and lesbians. After
Michael Brown was killed in Ferguson in 2014, Denny joined the Communist Party,
and today also writes for People’s World.
Communists in Closets ends with Angela Davis, Aptheker’s
comrade, coworker, and friend for most of each other’s lives. Davis speaks
about her long romantic relationship with Gina Dent, a colleague in feminist
studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and celebrates their work
together organizing the prison-abolition organization Critical Resistance. “I
am fine with queer” as a personal descriptor of herself, Davis tells Aptheker,
“but I prefer anti-racist and anti-capitalist” as self-identifiers, since they
describe the heart of her political work. That lifetime of work was honored
last year when the San Francisco longshore union, ILWU Local 10, made her its
third honorary member, joining Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King Jr.
Aptheker recalls Davis’s 2009 speech before an audience that
gave her a “warm, loving welcome.” She discarded her notes to tell them they
had to embrace transgender people as part of “our movement,” regardless of whom
it made uncomfortable, insisting that “we must constantly expand our idea of
freedom.”
A Fuller Account of Life in the Party
Both Cherny and Aptheker include great detail in the
presentation of their arguments. With Cherny, we get the broad strokes of party
history in San Francisco, albeit with some blank spaces. With Aptheker, we get
deep insight into the trials of individual members — beyond San Francisco, but
applicable to many San Franciscans — as they seek to realize their political
ideas in an environment of repression, not just from the power structure they
oppose but also from their own party.
The figures on their stages are mostly (though not entirely)
leaders and organizers. Through them, we see a lot of the history of the
Communist Party’s policies and political strategy, and the cost to those who
were out in front. But behind leaders were the ordinary party members who made
it all work. They got signatures on the petitions. They staffed Camp Seeds of
Tomorrow, the summer camp for the children of party members and their friends.
People like Bob Lindsey, who sat behind the counter of the bookstore on San
Jose’s First Street, or those who staffed the one on Bancroft Way in Berkeley,
or the one in Downtown San Francisco.
I think of my parents, who were not national leaders or
important people in the sense that many are in these two books: My mom in her
classes, and later writing children’s books. My father as he sought a job that
could keep our family going in the wake of the blacklist, even if it meant
moving across the country.
In Tribute of a Lifetime, published by the Committees of
Correspondence after the party split in 1992, I found a piece that to me sums
up this kind of contribution. The party had an expression that honored the
ordinary work of political organizing. As party member Alice Correll described
it:
From the time I was recruited into the YCL [Young Communist
League] in 1937 I have been a Jenny Higgins [men were called Jimmy Higgins]. I
was the one who kept the books, collected the dues, baked the casseroles,
washed the fund-raiser dishes, and always paid my dues (the secret of my
popularity!). In Seattle, in New York City during the wide open Browder period,
later in San Francisco when we met only in tiny “cells,” I have always been a
private in the army. Where would the sergeants and the generals be without us?
