COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

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Woodland, Frankie Waldron fell in love. At the end of the session when Willie arrived to reclaim his wife, Frankie and Reggie had to tell him that he had arrived too late. Willie disconsolately went back to Los Angeles to immerse himself in party work and later got a divorce. Frankie and the new Mrs. Reggie Waldron returned from Woodland to set up Communist housekeeping in Southern California.

Half Citizens. The U.S. Communist Party, born in 1919, was a rachitic child dropped on the U.S. doorstep by the Russian Revolution. The U.S., historically crowded with rebels and reformers—vegetarians, Fletcherizers, yogi followers and deep-breathers; Know-Nothings, Single-Taxers, Abolitionists and seekers after Utopias; Tom Paines, John Browns, W. J. Bryans and Gene Debses—always had room for one more heresy, even a foundling of communism.

The infant was not big. Up to the time Frankie was falling in love in Woodland, the party had never had more than about 10,000 members. But what it "lacked in size, it made up for in lung power. Its piercing Marxist cry—that capitalism was robbing the worker of the wealth which he alone created—burned into the souls of some Americans like a hot skewer.

Its early history was an internal struggle for political power. One of its clawing rivals for leadership was William Foster, head of the Trade Union Educational League, the party's labor decoy. He was born in Taunton, Mass, in 1881, onetime worker in a rendering plant, seaman, streetcar motorman, homesteader, gandy dancer, Wobbly and hobo. Stalin ended all rivalries in 1930 by enshrining Earl Browder at the top. Browder, born in Wichita, Kans. in 1891, was a onetime bookkeeper for a drug house, flute player, mystic and draft resister in World War I, for which he went to prison.

They were failures in the community. As all good Communist leaders must be, they were men with a talent for subservience, half citizens in the half-lit world of the Communist conspiracy. To rule, it was necessary to take orders. The only True Word, they taught as they had been taught, was the word from Moscow. Actually political neuters, they lived by the rule that the Comintern was the responsible custodian of men's minds and men's consciences.

The Almost Martyr. The Word sent by Moscow in 1930 to the Communist Party, U.S.A. was: "Seize the streets." It meant: riot, raise hell, harass the law. If heads were cracked, so much the better; cracked heads made martyrs. In the first year of the great depression, California's population was resentful and disorderly. Thousands were out of work. The arm of the law was muscular and impatient.