COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

(4 of 8)

Frankie was pinched trying to organize the pea pickers of the Imperial Valley. Frankie was pinched for unlawful assembly in Los Angeles. He was in jail the night before Reggie bore him a baby, Timothy. His ostensible employment was that of an ice man. With that other, ever-loyal functionary, Willie Schneiderman,* he tried to organize the waterfront, and began to attract the attention of party headquarters in New York. He was charged with resisting arrest during a melee in Los Angeles' Plaza. Then during an unemployment demonstration he waved a placard reading, "Defend the Soviet Union," and got a sentence of $500 fine and 180 days in jail. Frankie almost became a martyr then, but the party had other plans for him. On orders, Frankie jumped bail and vanished into the party's underground.

One night Reggie called for Mrs. Amelia Waldron in a curtained car and drove her to a hideaway on the city's outskirts. There was Frankie. He told his stepmother excitedly: "I'm going to Russia. You'll hear from me." That was the last Amelia ever saw of him. She did hear from him by way of an occasional postcard from Europe. Some years later a Los Angeles lawyer told her to stop around at his office, there confided to her that Reggie was happy, that Timothy was learning to speak Russian, and that Frankie was enrolled at the Lenin Institute in Moscow.

Young Man in Tweeds. For Frankie Waldron, those months between postcards were an odyssey. He had fled the U.S. on a passport made out to "Paul Walsh." Reggie had followed him as "Mrs. Walsh," presumably taking Timothy with her. Frankie went to Europe, probably stopped in at Moscow, went to South Africa, on to China, then back to Moscow.

If Frankie ever had any doubts about the choice he had made, he was sucked in now; there was no turning back. In Shanghai, living at the Foncin Apartments, 643 Route Frelupt, he operated as a Red organizer. He used many aliases. Somewhere along the line he decided that he would become "Eugene Dennis." So far as he was concerned, Francis X. Waldron Jr. was dead and buried. Not a trace of him remained, not even a Seattle streetcar token.

In 1935, Eugene Dennis, a tall, tweedy, pipe-smoking young man, showed up in the Communist circles of Milwaukee with his pretty brunette wife, "Peggie." Timothy was not with them. So far as any records show, Timothy was, never brought back to the U.S.

Children of Revolution. By then, the party line had been changed. The orders from Moscow were to soft-pedal talk of revolution, work surreptitiously, bore into labor, into Roosevelt's New Deal. It was the beginning of the Pink Decade, when communism hid its face behind a hundred bland fronts, and thousands of U.S. citizens—the well-meaning, the intellectual, the starry-eyed and the muddleheaded—flocked around its feet.

In those Popular Front days, Organizer Dennis operated from a bare, dirty, guarded office over the Oneida Restaurant at 113 East Wells Street, Milwaukee. His methods and objectives were multifarious.