COMMUNISTS: The Little Commissar

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In his tweeds, sucking on his pipe, or a cigarette, or a cigar—whatever came to hand—grey-haired, paunchy and tentatively smiling, the graduate of Franklin High School moved into the darkness of top leadership. The ancient William Foster was made chairman—actually, a secondary job. Eugene Dennis, as general secretary, became the little commissar.

Man on the Ninth Floor. Three years have gone by since the hand fell on Dennis' shoulder. They were times to try the soul of a less artful dodger. Times were not good for U.S. communism. Organized labor, which had once been so tolerant of the whole business, had reacted violently against it. The party which had once controlled a good chunk of the C.I.O. unions, retained desperate control in only two big ones: the electric workers and the West Coast longshoremen. The alien cast of communism's face became plain for everyone to see. The disclosure of Communist espionage sent Reds scuttling in every direction.

Like any good commissar, Dennis carried out Moscow's orders. But he was not too skillful as an executive officer and tactician. He tried, for example, to get Mike Quill, onetime devout party-liner, to throw the support of his C.I.O. Transport Workers Union behind Henry Wallace's presidential campaign. Quill refused. When

Dennis threatened, the unpredictable Quill dumped the Reds out of his union, declared open war on the party.

Dennis ran into personal trouble. In 1947 the House Un-American Activities Committee demanded to know his right name. He refused to disclose it and spurned a subpoena. For that he was cited for contempt of Congress. The charge is still pending against him.

In his ninth-floor office he paced up & down at conferences, a sly, chain-smoking man from whom all humor had gone. Sometimes in the middle of a discussion he stepped outside and came back with a shot of whisky, which he downed straight.

People outside the office saw little of him. Every morning, a bespectacled chauffeur-bodyguard knocked on the sixth-floor door of his apartment at 420 West 119th Street (near Columbia University), escorted him down to a Chrysler sedan and drove him to the office. In the evening the chauffeur took him home again in the same solicitous fashion.

Peggie kept house in their small, spare, $70-a-month apartment. She gave callers the once-over through a peephole in the front door, although she chattered loudly and publicly over the pay telephone in the lobby. Curiously, the Dennises had no telephone. Now no longer active in the party, she brought up their second baby, Gene (bom in 1942), and prepared large meals for her chubby husband. The Dennises were scarcely noticed by the neighbors until the congressional inquiry disclosed his identity.

In the summer of 1948 the Government moved in on him and his party. That was how Frankie Waldron's star came to rest in the courthouse in Foley Square.