COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

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Dennis served as a kind of handyman. He ran errands. He followed orders and aped his superiors. He coddled such Commie fronts as Negro Leader Max Yergen's National Negro Congress and cynically betrayed them. (Years later disillusioned Max Yergen declared: "I was finally repelled by the lack of principle, the moral rottenness of Communist Party practices.")

Dennis' chief Earl Browder was sent to jail for the popular Communist felony of passport fraud. Robert Minor, an elderly and bemused ex-St. Louis Post-Dispatch cartoonist, was given the temporary job of boss. But Browder, let out of jail by Franklin Roosevelt, got his old job back and picked up the next line from Moscow. Hitler had marched on Russia. The new and urgent line was to make peace with the capitalist U.S., piously preach collaboration of all "democratic" forces against their common fascist enemy. Roosevelt, who had been denounced as a "dirty warmonger," was a hero again at 35 East Twelfth Street.

The obedient Browder preached the doctrine from the housetops, and the obedient Dennis echoed him word for word.

The Hand of Moscow. Then destiny opened like a tunnel for the ninth floor's handyman. World War II ended. Collaboration ended with it. Moscow, triumphant and with other worlds to win, gave the order for a return to the war against capitalism. It meant another convulsive line-switch; it meant the end of Earl Browder. To underline the change which had occurred, Browder and "Browderism" were attacked with all the vituperation at the party propagandists' command.

Browder was kicked out of the party. Just to keep him on ice, Moscow commissioned him to act as an agent in the U.S. for Soviet publishers. In a one-room office on 42nd Street, he smoked his pipe and stared into space, loyally mumbling the line that the assassination of his character was only an "incidental of a political struggle." It was as close to accuracy as Comrade Browder ever got.

Dennis quickly learned the new doctrine and stared into the tunnel now yawning before him. Who would be chosen for Browder's job? There were some fairly smart men around headquarters: Jack Stachel, a little man with the face of a heron who had been in & out of the underground; cold, Kewpie-like John Williamson, national labor secretary. But Moscow's hand fell on the shoulder of U.S.-born Eugene Dennis.

Loudly and vehemently Dennis disclaimed Browderism, of which he had been one of the loudest mouthpieces when Browderism was the party line. He told the comrades: in their zeal to defeat Hitler, he and the other chieftains around headquarters had "dragged at the tail end of Roosevelt . . . did not adequately maintain our own Communist identity and vanguard role." This is the sin now known, in the Aesopian doubletalk of communism, as "tailism." Browder, said Dennis, was still hypnotized by his "original opportunist illusions." But Dennis' eyes had been opened. To the barricades!