COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

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He taught the gospel to the young at a "labor school." He used gullible university professors to drum up recruits among their students. He threw parties to recruit young men for the war in Spain. After the youths had had a quantity of Dennis' liquor and a good dose of his oratory, their duty became plain. He arranged their passports and sent them packing, full of zeal. For Dennis, no chance for conquest was to be neglected. One of his followers, pretty, brown-haired Ann Sabljak of the Young Communist League, wriggled her way into the Methodist Episcopal Church's old Epworth League. One ex-Red remembers a Sunday night when Ann got an Epworth League discussion group around to agreeing that if Christ were alive today he would be a strike leader and a revolutionist.

An Old Armchair. The man in tweeds did not confine his operations to the young. He captivated Meta Berger, well-to-do widow of Victor Berger, first Socialist Congressman. Plump, motherly, highly respected Mrs. Berger was entranced by the eloquence of handsome, charming Eugene Dennis. He persuaded her to go to Russia, and she returned piping the glories of the Soviet Union. Her country home became a second home for Dennis, who settled comfortably into the late Congressman Berger's old armchair. Meta Berger died in 1944, still not disabused.

But Dennis' chief exploit of the Pink Decade was in the labor field. He made a Communist out of violent Harold Christoffel, an aggrieved electrical apprentice at Allis-Chalmers, manufacturers of industrial machinery. Christoffel married Ann Sabljak. Under Dennis' direction, Christoffel engineered a seizure of the State C.I.O. Council. With the help of a goon squad, Christoffel seized and dominated Allis-Chalmers' C.I.O. auto workers' union. In 1941 Dennis' work paid off. It was the period of the Stalin-Hitler pact, when

Moscow policy was to sabotage U.S. war production. Dennis' man Christoffel was able to strike the plant and close it up tight for 76 days. Allis-Chalmers was then manufacturing machinery for war; the strike was one of the costliest work stoppages of the whole U.S. war-production effort.

Again Dennis got his reward. He was called to New York to serve in the holy of holies—headquarters.

The Little Kremlin. All but the most secret Communist operations in the U.S. were, and still are, directed from the ramshackle, nine-story loft building at 35 East Twelfth Street, not far from Manhattan's Union Square. To its top-floor offices came the Communist International "Reps," the shadowy men with the changeable names like P. Green, G. Williams, A. Ewert, H. Berger, which in a wink of the eye might become Drabkin, B. Mikhailov, Braun or Gerhart Eisler. These were Moscow's agents. From the ninth floor the Word which they brought from Moscow was passed along to the faithful, to the party hacks on the Daily Worker and the Yiddish-language Freiheit, to the cultivators of organized labor's vineyards, to men like Christoffel in Milwaukee.