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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.
i just like the phrasing
As for the individual Communist at the branch level, four-fifths of the time he followed Party directives, one-fifth of the time he was on his own; on his own, he was supposed to respond to whatever happened in the course of a day in the neighborhood. (“What exactly does that mean?” I ask Lanzetti. “Oh,” he replies, “if there was a tenant conviction, or a sick comrade, or if he was needed to join a picket line, or canvas during an election. Or if the neighborhood needed a traffic light, or a shopkeeper was having trouble with the Fire Department. You know,” he grins, “just like the neighborhood Democratic Party would have operated—only we always got there first.”) The branch member’s other duties consisted of contributing a week’s wages to the Party once a year, selling the Daily Worker, and running off weekly leaflets.
the dream
“One night after a meeting she asks me if she can talk to me. I nod sure, she sits down and starts to tell me, very hesitantly, that there’s this man she’s in love with. I think she’s about to tell me she’s afraid to sleep with him, and I start to tell her if you’re in love there’s nothing wrong with. . . . ‘Oh no, no, no,’ she interrupts me, ‘it’s nothing like that. Of course, we’ve been sleeping together. It’s that he’s Chinese. I’m terrified to tell my father we want to get married.’
“I stare at her. What the hell do I do with this? Finally, I say to her, ‘Look, if you’re afraid to tell him alone I’ll go with you.’ ‘You’ll go with me?’ she says. ‘Not only me,’ I say, ‘we’ll take a delegation if that’ll make you feel any better.’ ‘A delegation?’ she says. ‘Sure,’ I say, getting into the swing of it, ‘we’ll take the whole damned Communist Party. Why not? You got a right.’ ‘I’ll think it over,’ she says, and she goes away.
“Well, of course, I forgot all about it, the work went on, and a month later, after another meeting, Lilly suddenly comes up to me again, and she’s beaming from ear to ear. What happened?’ I say. ‘Well,’ she says, ‘it took me all this time to get up the nerve to say anything to my father, but last week I came home from work one night and I marched into his room and I stood in the doorway and I said: “I’m getting married.” He looked up at me and he just stared at me for a long time. Then he said: “Is he Jewish?” “No, Pa,” I said, “he’s not, he’s Chinese.” My father stared at me in such a way I knew he was thinking one of us had lost his mind and he wasn’t sure which one it was. But after a while he was sure. “I’ll kill you,” he said. My knees started to buckle. Then all of a sudden it was like you were there in the room with me. I saw you and my branch organizer and all the people I work with and I felt like the whole Communist Party was right there in the room with me. I looked at my father and I said to him: “If you kill me, who’ll cook your eggs?” He hasn’t said a word to me since. Li and I are getting married next week.’
love this story
When I ask her if she feels she sacrificed her life to the Communist Party, Maggie’s face loses its now-blurred appearance, the blue eyes clear and spark. She leans forward on the couch, one hand on her hip, her mouth breaking into her irrepressible smile, and she says: “Sacrificed my life! Of course not. Hon, we were in the world-changing business. You can’t get much better than that. What’s better? Money? Position? Are you kidding?”
Immediately, she entered into a state of conflict from which she never seemed to emerge: when she was playing the piano she felt guilty because of all the people starving to death in the world, and when she was at Party meetings she felt uneasy because she knew she wasn’t really very good at being a Communist and longed to be back at her piano. She couldn’t talk about Beethoven with anyone in the Party, and she couldn’t put the Party out of her mind when she was listening to Beethoven. The split in her hovered on a scale of evenly balanced tension. Then the scale tipped: she gave up music.
sad
“And, of course, you mustn’t forget, the life was exciting, very exciting. We felt—he did, and I did, too—like we had our hands on ‘the throttle of history,’ as we used to say. That’s an extraordinary feeling. When Hitler rose to power and all those lost, floundering liberals were wandering around saying ‘How could it happen in cultured, civilized Germany?’ we knew. That was a tremendous comfort. We were inside the circle of light, unlike those poor benighted others in the dark outside. They had to contend with the existential dilemma of a crumbling civilization. Not us. That, of course, was the other side of the coin. Not one of us knew what the hell was going on inside ourselves, but we all could explain the world.