I was sort of the outdoor organizer for the John Reed Club. I was organizer of everything in the West, and, of course, the New York apparatus thought the West started at Hoboken and that is one reason the Chicago organization was better the reason it had people like Dick Wright and Farrell and people like — Outside of New York, we tried to confine the thing to bona fide artists and writers. In San Francisco our people were actually involved in the real labor movement. You have to understand that there was an enormous amount of bullshit. People were running around talking about "the masses" and there wasn't really any contact with the masses. But hell, I mean, I wrote the Waterfront Worker ... all of the goddamn thing, week after week after week. A mimeographed thing we used to hand out on the waterfront long before the strike. All of us were actually were involved. We were involved in the Agricultural Workers Industrial Union. I had somebody ask me one time at an anarchist meeting in Italy, "Is The Grapes of Wrath true?" One-eighth is true. In the novel, one guy gets killed. In a Bakersfield cotton strike, to which I took Steinbeck, eight guys get killed.

You see, all of us were very actively involved and this makes all the difference in the world. Another thing, very few of these people were orthodox Commies because the basic tradition on the West Coast was IWW. The attitude was really an anarchistic attitude, and for many years I treasured to — flaunt in the face of the FBI, if they ever bothered me — an application to the Communist Party that had written across it, "Comrade Rexroth is a very valuable comrade, but he is entirely too much of an anarchist to be good party material." It was signed by Earl Browder, the general secretary of the Party. This movement stretched all the way from Seattle, where the dominated the intellectual and Bohemian world in the years around the First World War and well into the twenties. People like Gary Snyder, over a generation later than myself, and I grew up in very similar worlds.