REBIRTH OF AN AMERICAN

Waikato Times, Volume 127, Issue 21194, 17 August 1940, Page 11 (Supplement)

REBIRTH OF AN AMERICAN

JOURNALIST S CONFESSIONS :: RENOUNCED COMMUNISM

Howard Rushmore (Condensed from American Magazine)

JJECENTLY A YOUNG FELLOW who had read of my resignation from the Communist Party wrote me that he was glad the Reds were losing their grip on the youth of this country. But he wondered why I, a tenthgeneration American, had joined the Stalin group in the first place. I told him that I became a Communist because I had believed that the way to true democracy was through Communism, and that T resigned because I learned in the Red schoolhouse that I was wrong. The Communists’ hatred for me is deep. “Rushmore, you’re a traitor—the proletariat will take care of you,” threatened one of my former Red friends. I was reminded that in Russia I would have been shot for denouncing “the Party.” I spent six years in their organisation—years of sacrifice and poverty and blind loyalty. I was managing editor of the Young Communist League’s official paper, state organiser of that group for the Dakotas, and assistant state organiser for the Communist Party in lowa. As the party hierarchy goes, those were high positions. But I did not want power; I wanted the answers to a lot of questions I thought the Communist system could answer. I was born in 1912, of a long line of New England and Great Plains farmers. When I was eight, my father lost his job in the railroad yards of Sheridan, Wyoming, and took advantage of the government homestead offers to “prove up” a 320-acre claim. We had no irrigation, no modern machinery; a flatbed waggon was our only means of transportation. From spring thaws until September frosts Dad was constantly planting, cultivating, harvesting. My mother helped with the chores, milking the cows, slopping the hogs, tending the huge garden and canning the vegetables that would be our winter food. They grew old before my eyes. “Are my parents always to be poor?” I asked my teacher in the village school. “Remember,” she answered solemnly, “what Abe Lincoln said : ‘God must love the common people, for He made so many of them’.” Why could not she have told me that Democracy is as Slow as it is Great; that homesteading had not reached the stage where the government could give its farmers modern machinery and irrigation; that some people had to work hard and reap little because democracy had not reached the point of perfect equality ? When I was 14 my parents moved to Missouri. “Howard likes to read,” I had heard my father say. “Reckon we’d better get him in a school where he can get education and make something of himself.” We rented a little house in Mexico, Missouri, and Dad landed a job wheeling tile in the local brick plant. During our first two years there I read half the books in the town library. I learned of social conflicts and unrest. I discovered that democracy had produced many greedy men who loved not country but self. A book on Mussolini pictured a new life under a new banner. When I asked my history teacher. “Is fascism practical ? Does it eliminate corruption?” she merely said, “You should not read such books until you’re older and can understand them.” During my first year in high school I worked from 5 p.m. until midnight at the brick plant, stacking heavy clay. Seven hours’ work netted me 70 cents, 3.50 dollars a week. Then, like thousands of youths during the depression years, I took to the road. I spent the summer in Washington, picking cherries, apples and peaches in the blazing sun. The pay was ten cents an hour; the peaches sold back home for five cents each. I spoke ot this inequality of supply and demand to a young picker in the next tree. “Brother, I ain’t worryin’ about that,” he shrugged. “In a week they’ll all be picked. Where do we go from here?” I became a part of migratory labour, doubtful of tomorrow, uncertain of today. We rode in boxcars reeking of manure. We ate together in “jungles,” huddling against the cold. The hope went out of us. I saw Jackie, a black-haired little fellow from the East, miss his grip on a fast-moving freight and go under the wheels. “He’s better off,” someone said. “He ain’t got nothin 1 to worry about now.” I returned home to find conditions there even worse One day in the library I picked up a book on the Russian experiment and was overpowered by a flood of new idea? from a new world. My mind was receptive then and had this been a book on democracy in action, explaining that Gradually Democracy Was Doing Things to help jobless youth, the aged and the sick. I would have clung to democracy with renewed conviction. But there was no such book, and I do not know of one today So, weary of poverty, bewildered by selfishness and ignorance, I grasped the new Utopia. There was a chapter glorifying the achievements of young Russian factory workers, farmers, writers. “He who has the youth has the future” was the Communist slogan that convinced me. I joined the party. The air of mystery and intrigue seemed glamorous to me; the party workers, heroes. For two years I never questioned an act or a slogan of the Communist Party. I saw democracy’s faults exaggerated. I wrote “proletarian” short stories that were accepted by the radical

magazines. In 1935 I went to New York to attend a writers’ congress. While there the Young Worker, a weekly paper published by the Young Communist League, invited me to become its managing editor. The bushy-haired editor informed me that the salary was 10 dollars a week. “But is not it better,” he added, “than working for a capitalist lie-sheet?” I helped write classconscious stories of youth in strikes and revolutionary activity. I wrote features and a column. I averaged 14 hours a day, and loved it. My salary provided only two meals a day, sometimes none, but that helped me acquire the necessary persecution complex. During that first year a Communist official whom I had met failed tc show up at his office one day. The records disclosed a 2000 dollar shortage. “Why can not the theory of communism overcome these capitalist inhibitions of our comrades?” I asked the editor of the Young Worker. He said the fault was in the individual. “But if individuals are weak, then the theory has no meaning,” I argued. “You have a bourgeois outlook, Comrade Rushmore,” the editor said coldly. I was perhaps too much of an idealist, but I had joined the party to escape just such things. My code contained Principles of Honesty and Loyalty and these were being violated. Neither could I approve the loose morals of the Young Communists. Some oi the love affairs I saw exceeded the limits of decency and common sense. My blind faith in the “party line’ wavered. I was still wondering what to do when suddenly the party turned from European slogans to “Americanism.’' Jackson, Lincoln, Jefferson became Communist heroes overnight. But it was merely a ruse to rid the party of its foreign taint. Many people who joined the party during that “red, white and blue” period saw through the hypocrisy when Earl Browder, national secretary, supported the Hitler-Stalin pact and Russia’s invasion of Finland. But I struggled to be faithful to my ideal. I wanted to help the jobless and the hopeless I had known. “1 need organisational experience,” I told the editor one day. So I was appointed Young Communist League organiser for North and South Dakota. There I spent six months, recruiting a few farm youths. Then I assisted the party organiser in lowa. But I could not make myself a rabble rouser, preying on lost hopes. In one locality we instigated a sit-down strike in relief headauarters. The cops were called and tear gas thrown. A baby in the arms of a woman striker was burned. “It wasn’t worth it, Jack,” I said to the organiser afterwards. “Why not?” he demanded. “We recruited two new party members and won a lot of support.” “But we did not get food for the people, and a baby got hurt. We cannot build a sound political organisation on hatred,” I said. Returning to New York, I was hired as a reporter by the Communist Daily Worker, and eventually edited the magazine section of its Sunday edition. Soon I learned that this newspaper’s editorial board was more intolerant and dogmatic than any straw boss I had ever encountered in the Missouri brick plant. In one article I mentioned that Browder had been booed. An editor substituted, “His speech was enthusiastically received.” “But,” I remonstrated, “that’s not true. You couldn’t hear the applause for the boos.” “History,” he replied sternly, “will award Comrade Browder a place in the Socialist sun. Who are you to dim that light?” When the Hitler-Stalin pact was signed, we all had to become experts at distortion. It was a move for peace, the editors wrote. When Russia attacked Finland, Stalin was still a “figure of world peace.” I though! of what the Young Worker editor had said about “capitalist liesheets.” I was a liar for Josef Stalin. My last work for the Communist Party was a review of Gone With the Wind. I found the picture entertaining and fairly truthful. The editorial board, none oi whom had seen the film, thought differently. “Any picture that supports the South can’t be truthful,” the Negro member told me. “You’ll have to rewrite the review and eliminate the bias. The party line is that nothing in the South is either decent or democratic.” “Democratic?” I cried. “You intolerant bigots speak of democracy!” I put the review in my pocket, wrote a short note of resignation and Left the Communist Party Forever. Today lam an American again. I can say what I please and write what I please, and in the world today that is a privilege I value as much as life itself. I joined the Communist Party because T did not understand democracy. I did not know, while I was in the brick plant, while I was on the freight trains, while I was a Communist, that democracy was working in its own slow way to do the things I wanted it to do. I believed democracy owed me everything. Now I know I owe a debt to democracy. Six years of my life have not been wasted. I do not feel bitter toward the Communists. They have shown me the faults of America, but also convinced me that democracy is the only way to mend them.