“Was the life good? Was it bad? How should I know? It was life, the only life I ever knew, and it was alive. Intense, absorbing, filled with a kind of comradeship I never again expect to know. In those basement clubrooms in The Coops, talking late into the night, every night for years, we literally felt we were making history. Do you know what I mean when I say that? We felt that what we thought and spoke and decided upon in those basement rooms in the Bronx was going to have an important effect on the entire world out there. Now, a sensation like that is beyond good or bad. It’s sweeping, powerful. More important,” he smiles cynically, “than good or bad. And,” soberly, “infinitely more compelling than anything in that other, bourgeois world could ever be. The idea when I was twenty of having a profession? making money? becoming a middle-class American? I literally would rather have been dead than have ended up like that. I remember I sat through City College like a zombie, only waiting each day to get back to the neighborhood and the meetings and the important, righteous, just, real world.”

One of the men who worked in the slaughterhouse was a socialist, a thin, burning-eyed man in his thirties. Dick Nikowsski was twenty years old. This socialist worked beside Dick, and became his friend. He talked endlessly, obsessively about “the bosses” and “the working stiffs.” Half the time Dick couldn’t follow the socialist, didn’t know what the hell he was talking about, thought only that he was going to get them all in trouble. But he liked the socialist because behind the rage he sensed something wild and wounded in the man, and besides, whenever there was a dispute between the foreman and a worker, the socialist was the only one who stuck his neck out for the worker.

Then, one day in summer when it was so blistering hot in the slaughterhouse the sweat was pouring down into the men’s eyes, blinding them, the socialist suddenly turned to Dick and said to him: “Do you know where the owners are now? Right now while you and I are here sweating like pigs?” “No,” Dick replied, “where?” The socialist took a folded page of newspaper from his pocket. “There!” he thundered. “At the coast!” Dick stared blindly at the picture of a group of men and women lying languidly by the sea. The blue eyes of the seventy-year-old Nikowsski stare at me, fifty years disappearing in their wide gaze. “I didn’t even know what the coast was,” he says in wonder as fresh as that of the twenty-year-old still alive inside him.

"[...] I understood everything the socialist had been saying. Everything! I saw it all at once. And all at once, I saw, and I could hardly believe this, there was a way out for me. Now, you gotta understand what this means. I didn’t even know that I was thinking there’s no way out of this life for me until suddenly I was thinking there is a way out. It’s complicated, but you get what I mean? I saw that being a worker was literally slavery, and that the slavery came from being like a dumb animal hitched forever to the machine, and this idea of us as a class relieved the slavery, gave you a way to fight, gave you a way to become a human being.

“One day when I was about seventeen I was walking up and down in front of a restaurant in some small town in Montana. I had a sandwich board strapped to my chest and back, advertising the restaurant, and I’d been promised a meal if I walked that beat for six hours. So I’m walking up and down there, and some guy comes up to me and he’s about forty, fifty years old, and he’s got cold, angry blue eyes and a big beard like prospectors wore up in the hills, and he says to me: ‘You an Amurrican?’ ‘Sure,’ I says back. He points his finger, really angry, at the sandwich board, and he says to me, ‘You’re an Amurrican and a human being. It don’t seem right that you should have to do that just to eat a meal.’ And he made me take the sandwich board off, right there in the middle of the street, and told me to come with him. I was thunderstruck. No one in my whole life had ever said anything like what he’d just said to me. There was nothing for it but to do as he said, and go with him.

“He took me on out to the edge of town and there, on an embankment near a small river, was a campfire and a bunch of guys sitting around it. I thought they were hoboes, but they weren’t. They were Wobblies. They sat me down, gave me some food to eat, explained themselves to me, and within twelve hours they brought politics into my life. [...]

“Of course, I took to the Wobblies right away. It wasn’t just that they were kind to me, and that their talk hypnotized me, and that somehow I knew they were saying something important and they had a lot of guts to be saying it. No, it wasn’t just that. I don’t know how to explain it to you, but all that talk about solidarity and the working class, I didn’t know what the words meant, but somehow, they were touching that loneliness in me. Something flickered up in me, it was warming, I didn’t feel lonely listening to the Wobblies.

Blossom Sheed was born in 1909 in Memphis, Tennessee to a father whose parents had been abolitionists and a mother who came out of democratic agrarian Nebraska. They were literally the salt of the American earth, the kind of people who had fought cheerfully in the Revolution, bravely in the Civil War, and then, in the incredible Panics and Depressions brought on by the rise of the robber barons, had formed themselves into Worker and Farmer Alliances and become the American populists. They were land-bound, family-bound Americans who really believed that the American democracy was meant to serve them not exploit them, and time and time again were shocked to discover that the democracy was not theirs by right, that they would have to fight over and over again simply to survive in it.

Between 1929 and 1935 a series of spectacular strikes broke out among laborers in the California farm valleys. As McWilliams wrote: “Never before had farm laborers organized on any such scale and never before had they conducted strikes of such magnitude and such far-reaching social consequence.” In a time of common desperation the desperation of the farm laborers had reached an unbearable pitch. Repeatedly, rhythmically, explosively the strikes went on and on, gathering speed, force, and numbers. One was stifled and two broke out; fifty people were jailed and a hundred took their places; men were shot on the picket lines and wives and children were soon standing where the men had fallen. The farm laborers had become, seemingly overnight, what human beings become when they are ready to die rather than go on living as they have lived: a unified people, steel snaking down through their souls, dry-eyed fury filling their faces, a power of organized defiance. Thousands of that vast, ragged army of America’s most disinherited workers surged onto the picket lines, transformed from enduring silents into striking workers, sustaining and urging each other on with the raw eloquence that comes to those whose social sense of self is sudden, direct, overwhelming. And sustain each other they surely needed to do, for the terror and violence that accompanied the farm valley strikes was almost unimaginable. Strike leaders were beaten, jailed, and killed. The towns, owned by the farm combines, were filled with armed vigilantes. The press, the clergy, and the courts were unified in their outrage against the farm workers. It was years and years of wholesale arrests, scares, beatings, and killings.

“The years with the fruit pickers became a world within the world,” Marian says, “a microcosm of feelings that never left me, not even when I left them. I lived with the pickers, ate, slept, and got drunk with them. I helped bury their men and deliver their babies. We laughed, cried, and talked endlessly into the night together. And, slowly, some extraordinary interchange began to take place between us. I taught them how to read, and they taught me how to think. I taught them how to organize, and they taught me how to lead. I saw things happening to people I’d never seen before. I saw them becoming as they never dreamed they could become. Day by day people were developing, transforming, communicating inarticulate dreams, discovering a force of being in themselves. Desires, skills, capacities they didn’t know they had blossomed under the pressure of active struggle. And the sweetness, the generosity, the pure comradeship that came flowing out of them as they began to feel themselves! They were—there’s no other word for it—noble. Powerful in struggle, no longer sluggish with depression, they became inventive, alive, democratic, filled with an instinctive sense of responsibility for each other. And we were all like that, all of us, the spirit touched all of us. It was my dream of socialism come to life. I saw then what it could be like, what people could always be like, how good the earth and all the things upon it could be, how sweet to be alive and to feel yourself in everyone else.

“[...] those years with the fruit pickers were the very best years of my life. Nothing since has even remotely touched them. No love affair, no Party power, nothing can compare with what I felt then among those people during that time of struggle. I don’t know, in the end maybe that’s what makes the difference between Communists and other people. Of all the emotions I’ve known in life, nothing compares with the emotion of total comradeship I knew among the fruit pickers in the Thirties, nothing else has ever made me feel as alive, as coherent. [...]"

Diana rises from the couch and walks across the room to pour herself another drink. She stands in silence with her back to me. Then she turns around, leans against the mahogany bar, and says: “I was vain, shallow, pretty, and energetic. Mad for sexual success and popularity, and yes, secretly wanting bourgeois comfort and bourgeois success. But,” her head goes back, the dark helmet-like hair swinging out in a graceful, defiant arc, “I was a Communist. And being a Communist made me better than I was. It was the great moral adventure of my life. I wouldn’t—not then, not now—have traded it for anything. There’s been nothing else in my life of which I can say that.”

[...] Communists remember the credo very much as Orwell remembers Spain: as characteristic of a time and a place when men and women experienced genuine comradeship, and were equalized by the deeper socialist definition of value and being; an experience closely parallel to that of the pioneer societies in which work loses the hierarchical value towards which all middle-class societies tend, and becomes subordinate to the fact that all work has the same value—i.e., that it is being done in the service of the new society, the one being built, the one to come. I think it is safe to say that for most Communists this sense of things dominated “living it out.”

Eric was a very smart kid. The force of his personality, coupled with his brains and drive, destined him to live out the life he has indeed lived out, a life filled with event and focus, large and dramatic doings. He won a scholarship to Brown University at a time when it was unthinkable for someone like him to go to an Ivy League school. At Brown, he says, he was drawn to drama and literature. But even as he speaks the words, one feels the unreality behind them—literature like a luxurious dream, a wistful longing around the edges of a consciousness pulled even before it knew it was being pulled toward politics and an overriding sense of class struggle. He graduated from Brown in 1935 and won a scholarship to Oxford; on his way to Oxford in 1936 he thought he’d just stop off in Spain and see what that was all about.