With that, Joe Bromberg came forward; he played Agate Keller, a man who’d lost one eye in an industrial accident. Clifford gave Agate a rousing summation. “Working class, unite and fight! Tear down the slaughterhouse of our lives. Let freedom really ring.” Then on to attack the union’s leadership: “These slick slobs stand here telling us about bogeymen, the Reds is bogeymen. But the man who got me food in 1932, he calls me COMRADE! The man who picked me up where I bled, he called me COMRADE too! What are we waiting for? Don’t wait for LEFTY! He might never come—” Whereupon he’s interrupted by a man—me—rushing down the theatre aisle and up on stage to announce: “They found Lefty—behind the car barns with a bullet in his head.”

To my astonishment when I read this play recently, I responded as I had when I first read it. I was thrilled to the verge of tears. In the passing of that half century of time, I’d turned violently anti-Communist. But the yearning for meaning, for dignity, for security in life, stirred me now as it had then. The Communists got their influence and their power by speaking up for these universal human desires. It seemed that I hadn’t changed; they had. How did they get their hold on the need for militancy? By being militant before the rest of our society knew it should. Something still alive in me reenlisted.