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4
Boy Bolsheviks

 

 

Kings Highway has been a major thoroughfare for three centuries. It cuts clear through Brooklyn and picks up again on the other side of the Bay in New Jersey; it was the King's road, and his troops retreated down it after the Battle of Monmouth. In 1936 it was the heart of a prosperous Brooklyn residential district. You got off at the BMT Brighton Line station and walked south along the highway, past restaurants and candy stores, kosher delicatessens and funeral parlors, and after half a dozen blocks you came to a storefront with meeting rooms on its second floor. Usually they were rented to wedding parties or bar mitzvahs, but one night a week they belonged to the Flatbush Branch of the Young Communist League.

Johnny Michel was a YCLer. When he told me that, I was startled and thrilled. It seemed a very grown-up thing to be. Elliptically I tried to find out from him what a Communist was, what they did in their meetings, how he had come to be one, why he thought it was worth doing. I didn't get much satisfaction out of him, but after a couple of months of building my curiosity the tip was ready to turn, and he allowed that if I really wanted to know all these things, I could come with him to a meeting and find out for myself. I was sixteen, and quite flattered to be chosen; I think I was also a little scared by it, which made it even more irresistible.

The room was still set up for some sort of party, fake palm trees in pots and hooded band instruments against the wall. There were about a hundred people there, mostly young, but none younger than I. The principal speaker didn't seem young at all to me. I suppose he was around thirty. His name was Mike Saunders (I found out later it was a "Party name"; most YCL leaders used them), and he gave a speech of welcome to all the "new friends" in the audience. (Until that moment I had thought I was the only one.) Probably we had come there with all sorts of misconceptions about the YCL, he said. He reminisced about his own first encounter. It had been that way with him. He hadn't known what to expect: people with bombs and beards, girls walking around with mattresses strapped to their backs. I was a little uncomfortable with that. It seemed to be in bad taste, and besides, it was a little bit of a downer because I had daydreamed about something like that myself. But the YCLers, Mike explained, were not like that. They were really no different from any other American youth, except in good ways: Smarter, more alert. More socially conscious. More politically aware of the real needs of the people, which were jobs, security, democracy, and peace. Communism, he told us, was Twentieth-Century Americanism. The Communists were the chief defenses of the liberty-loving peoples of the world against the Fascist imperialists, Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco. The Communists supported the right of workers to organize in trade unions. The Communists were against race discrimination and in favor of civil rights, and the first thing the Communists had to do, he told us, was to reelect Franklin Delano Roosevelt President of the United States. Not on the ticket of the corrupt Democratic Party! No, but on the ticket of free, socially conscious Americans, the new third party that had just been formed; and we sang a song about it:

 

We've got a baby all our own,

All our own, all our own,

We've got a baby all our own,

The Farmer-Labor Party!

 

A couple of speeches, a few lefty songs (and great old songs they were), and that was the end of the formal part of the evening. For the next hour or so we talked about the club newspaper they wanted to publish and general get-acquainted topics over coffee and cake.

I observed them with the paranoid care of any kid in strange surroundings. They seemed to be pretty nice people. They were the right age. All the leaders were in their twenties or beyond, but the rank and file were teen-agers, a lot of them high-schoolers like me. They appeared to be one hundred percent white and ninety percent Jewish, but that was no surprise. So was the neighborhood. In the late 1920s I had lived just a few blocks away, at 1701 East 14th Street, and I had early learned I was the only Presbyterian on the block. Most of the most interesting science-fiction fans and writers I was meeting were also Jewish, but not working at it, and it was the same in the YCL. And, like the sf community, they were bright and articulate. I have always liked meeting people who know a lot about things that interest me, and I found in the Flatbush YCL a lot of people who knew a great deal about music, theater, art; above all, about politics and history—two areas in which I was all but totally ignorant. One of the disadvantages of going to Brooklyn Tech was that there were no history courses. Another disadvantage was that there were no girls in Brooklyn Tech, nor in the monastically male sf community of the 30s, and the other great attribute of the YCLers was that nearly half of them were demonstrably and attractively female.

I don't think I ever heard Franco's name before I walked into that meeting—his revolt against the Spanish government had only begun a few weeks before. I doubt seriously that I ever gave a thought to the evils of Hitler or Mussolini, or to the virtues of trade unionism or the New Deal. But they sounded like good things to feel strongly about. I liked singing and learning new songs. I foresaw a great career for myself on the proposed chapter newspaper. And before I left the hall that night I was a paid-up member, with a little red card with a hammer and sickle on it.

Johnny and I went back and reported to our fellow fans. We didn't make much of an impression at that time. Don Wollheim listened tolerantly with his usual half-smile, eyes gazing forty-five degrees to starboard. I don't think he minded the parts about Spain and peace, but he couldn't go along with supporting Franklin D. Roosevelt. When the time came a couple of months later, he marched off to the polls and cast his ballot as he had intended all along, for Alfred Mossman Landon.

 

Words take on the coloration of their times. The word "Communist" has one sound today, had quite another in the 50s, when Joe McCarthy shambled across the land, and probably will sound different still in the year 2000. In 1936 it sounded adventurous, active, and, above all, "progressive."

I'm not sure what the word "progressive" meant to me, except that it seemed generally forward-looking. The Communists had made sure that it sounded so. They had finally figured out that if they didn't get a revolution in 1932, when the bonus marchers looked like an uprising even to Herbert Hoover and millions wondered where their next month's rent was coming from, they weren't going to get one at all in the foreseeable future. So the word had come down to broaden the base. It worked pretty well. The Communist Party and the YCL combined had well over a hundred thousand members in the late 30s, vastly more than ever before or after. They controlled countless other groups—workers' fraternal organizations, trade unions, anti-Fascist leagues—with memberships ten or a hundred times as large.

I carried my YCL card for almost four years. For most of that time I believed in what I was doing and worked hard at it, a regular Jimmy Higgins: president of my own branch, street-corner rabble-rouser, ace recruiter, even a kind of low-level policy maker. Of course, the really important policies were set by levels of leadership so high they disappeared out of sight. But in the implementation of the commandments there was room for interpretation, and I held membership in a dozen county and state committees and in the national conventions. It was all pretty open and aboveboard, except for this curious little custom of "Party names."

From 1940 on the Communist apparatus became a lot less benign and a hell of a lot more conspiratorial, but I was long gone by then. I suppose that even in the 1930s some sort of infrastructure was being laid. But I saw no signs of it, no trace of anything that I could not reconcile with the Pledge of Allegiance and the Boy Scouts' oath. Maybe half a dozen times I was asked to do mildly covert things: attend a Nazi Bund meeting as a potential convert to report back on what they were up to (I chickened out of that one), pretend to be a member of some union to take part in a picket line. That was about it. The YCL was so square it was a disappointment.

What we did was right out in the open. We cruised the five-and-tens looking for Japanese goods, and when we found them we picketed the stores, urging boycott. When the International Catholic Truth Society picketed theaters showing the movie Blockade, an ever-so-mildly pro-Loyalist film about the Spanish Civil War, we counterpicketed the International Catholic Truth Society. Several times a year we filled up Madison Square Garden with conventions, rallies, debates, anti-Fascist mass meetings, whatever. Those were glorious fun, twenty thousand clenched fists raised in the last lines of the "Internationale," and afterward streaming out to Times Square to picket Walgreen's drugstore (in the process of a strike at the time) or just to show the flag.

More than anything else, we met. There were meetings all the time. Each branch met once a week. Committees met when they could. Between times there were parties, socials, musicales. Those were fund-raisers, a dozen people paying a quarter apiece to listen to records in someone's apartment. Mostly what we heard was strictly long-hair, Beethoven-Bach-Brahms, rarely even Stravinsky or Prokofiev. Since I didn't own a record player until I was twenty, the most exposure I had to classical music was at YCL musicales.

The actual meetings of the branches were something else, heavily political, with a table of pamphlets always by the door, and wondering hurt in the eyes of the comrade behind the counter if you didn't buy a couple. Yet, politically, what they said made sense. In the social dialogue, the opposition always has all the best lines. Boycott Japanese goods? Why, only a couple years later every human being in America shared those feelings. Practice collective security against the Rome-Berlin Axis? In far less than a decade, that became American national policy; it is what we now call the United Nations. Trade unionism, civil rights, an end to racial and sexual discrimination—no one now thinks of them as revolutionary. What the Communist Party and the YCL stood for in the 1930s, absent Moscow, looks pretty good right now.

But Moscow was never absent. It was the Homeland of the Working Class, the socialist paradise. It could not be criticized. Whatever it did was right. Among the pamphlets for sale at the YCL meetings was a little copy of the new Constitution of the U.S.S.R., a marvelous document whose concern for the rights of individuals and national minorities should be an inspiration for freedom fighters everywhere. Especially in the U.S.S.R. We could see in the Soviet Constitution that the death penalty was abolished. We could see in the daily paper that, nevertheless, an astonishing number of Old Bolsheviks were being systematically stood up against a wall for left-wing, right-wing zigzag deviationism, and what was in those rifles, bottle corks? And yet this astonishing dichotomy not only was not resolved in the endless YCL discussions, it was not even raised. I do not remember a single person in any YCL meeting ever questioning the treason trials, the concentration camps, or the denial of civil rights. Not even me.

We simply closed our eyes to what we did not want to see, and, of course, there are those who still can. Even now. Even after Solzhenitsyn's memoirs and Khrushchev's "secret" speech. Two or three years ago I was standing on the steps of Moscow's Hotel Ukraine, waiting for the embassy driver to pick me up, and I struck up a conversation with an Australian trade unionist. He was on a socialist holiday, he told me. He had been saving up for ten years to do it.

Stars were in his eyes. He had been to a light-industry factory that morning, and wasn't it wonderful, he asked me, to see workers happily engaged in industries that they themselves owned?

My driver came by before I could think of an answer, which is fortunate enough because I didn't have one, or at least one that he would have been willing to hear. Clemenceau said, "A man who is not a socialist at twenty has no heart. A man who still is a socialist at forty has no head." And my Aussie friend was well past forty.

I think I learned something from my four years in the YCL, and most of what I learned was—what shall I call it?—skeptical compassion. I am a lot less sure of my own moral incorruptibility than I might otherwise have been and, maybe, a little less righteous about other people's sins.

Like most teen-agers, I had a general distrust of authority figures; also like most teen-agers, I had a strong need to be part of something larger than myself. The YCL solved those problems for me. I could march while I decried militarism, oppose regimentation in disciplined ranks.

I wonder sometimes what might have happened in some alternative paratime world—say one in which my father's parents had not left Germany and my mother's had somehow wandered there, so that I grew up under Hitler's Third Reich instead of Roosevelt's New Deal. Would I have joined the Hitler Youth as easily as I plunged into the YCL? I hope not. On good days I even think not. I don't see how I could possibly have swallowed that hogwash and joined with the murderers of the innocent. . . . But I comprehend how it is that others did.

 

Over the next couple of years Johnny Michel and I succeeded in persuading a few other science-fiction fans to follow us into the YCL.

Everything considered, we were not particularly successful. All YCLers were expected to reproduce themselves by the recruitment of others, and we did what we could; but most of my own tally of souls won for Stalin came from casual contacts at open-air meetings, prospect lists furnished by higher authority, and other sources not connected with science fiction.

I don't think our failure was because Communism was so outrageous an idea for science-fiction fans. It may even have been that it was not outrageous enough. Science-fiction fans, like science-fiction writers, are about the most obstinately individual people alive, and they do get into strange things. Preaching Marxism, we were competing with Technocrats, Esperantists, Single-Taxers, New Dealers, Ham-and-Eggers, and even one or two self-labeled Fascists. None of them were making much headway, either.

Of course, we were quite sure that there was a significant difference between them and us. They were whoring after false gods, and we had the real stuff. So six or eight of us constituted ourselves The Committee for the Political Advancement of Science Fiction, and drew up a manifesto for what we called "Michelism."

The Michelist Manifesto, signed by John B. Michel himself, but written with the help of all us master theoreticians, was syncretic, idiosyncratic, and stylistically derived from an F. Odin Tremaine thought-variant story. It had a lot of V. I. Lenin in it, and a lot of H. G. Wells. We circulated it like any other fanzine, and it drew about the same kind of response, which is to say, it was treated as an entertainment instead of a revelation.

If we couldn't make Bolsheviks, perhaps we could at least create a few fellow travelers. Some of us copied the names of new fans out of the letter columns in Astounding and Thrilling Wonder and attempted conversion by mail:

 

Dear Jim:

I enjoyed your letter in Brass Tacks, and I think you are right about Doc Smith. Have you read "Wollheim Speaking for Boskone"? It really shows what a Fascist mentality Smith and John Campbell are trying to foist off on us. A lot of us progressive fans are getting pretty irritated, and if you'd like to join us

 

That didn't accomplish very much, giving our political-action efforts a nearly perfect score. I don't really think we expected it to. We knew whom we were dealing with: science-fiction fans. In order to read science fiction with any enjoyment, you have to be willing to make some pretty preposterous assumptions: men from Mars, time machines, invisibility, trips through the fourth dimension, all manner of mind-blowers. You don't have to believe these things are real. But you have to accept them as postulates at least while you are reading the story, or the story won't work. Trained in that school, science-fiction fans will play any game you propose. Just tell them the rules, and they're off . . . and then, ten minutes later, they're playing a quite different game with other rules entirely, and nothing is changed. Right discouraging, it was. Or would have been . . . if we hadn't been playing the same game.

 

 

 

 

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