Markin comment:
Every January, as readers of this blog are now, hopefully, familiar with the international communist movement honors the 3 Ls-Lenin, Luxemburg and Liebknecht, fallen leaders of the early 20th century communist movement who died in this month (and whose untimely deaths left a huge, irreplaceable gap in the international leadership of that time). January is thus a time for us to reflect on the roots of our movement and those who brought us along this far. In order to give a fuller measure of honor to our fallen forbears this January, and in future Januarys, this space will honor others who have contributed in some way to the struggle for our communist future. That future classless society, however, will be the true memorial to their sacrifices. This year we pay special honor to American Communist party founder and later Trotskyist leader, James P. Cannon, Italian Communist Antonio Gramsci, and German Left Communist Karl Korsch.
Note on inclusion: As in other series on this site (“Labor’s Untold Story”, “Leaders Of The Bolshevik Revolution”, etc.) this year’s honorees do not exhaust the list of every possible communist worthy of the name. Nor, in fact, is the list limited to Bolshevik-style communists. There will be names included from other traditions (like anarchism, social democracy, the Diggers, Levellers, Jacobins, etc.) whose efforts contributed to the international struggle. Also, as was true of previous series this year’s efforts are no more than an introduction to these heroes of the class struggle. Future years will see more detailed information on each entry, particularly about many of the lesser known figures. Better yet, the reader can pick up the ball and run with it if he or she has more knowledge about the particular exploits of some communist militant, or to include a missing one.
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How We Overcame Ultraleftism in Defense Work
The following interview with James P. Cannon, the founder of the American Trotskyist movement, was granted to Syd Stapleton October 29, 1973.
The interview begins with a reference to the Political Rights Defense Fund. This is a committee seeking public support for a $27-million suit for damages filed last July 18 by the Socialist Workers party and the Young Socialist Alliance against Nixon and other government officials. The suit charges that government agencies, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation, carried out illegal wiretapping, mail tampering, job discrimination, and harassment of SWP and YSA members and supporters. It also cites incidents of SWP campaign headquarters being fire-bombed, bombed, and burglarized.
Question. What is your opinion of the Political Rights Defense Fund?
Answer. It's a proper and correct procedure to exploit every possibility to utilize what cracks there are in the bourgeois-democratic system to advance our ideas. It's
participating in part in their elections. It’s wise to utilize a situation like this to explain our ideas to a wider audience. This wasn't known to the old radical movement. The old radical movement tended toward the ultraleft view that courts are crooked instruments of the capitalist class, so why bother? Ignore them. Including the elections. That was the prevailing opinion of the syndicalists and red-socialist wing in which I was.
But I don't blame myself for being an ultraleftist in those days. I didn't know any better and there was nobody to teach us better. The only ones who spoke the other way were the right-wing socialists who thought you could accomplish everything through the ballot box. We were pretty sure that was false.
It was not until after the Russian revolution and Lenin wrote his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, explaining how revolutionists could utilize parliamentary action effectively, that we got straightened out on that. It was so damned simple and so convincing that I don't have any patience with people who still repeat the old arguments of the ultraleft before the Russian revolution.
I can recall instances in the early days where Lenin's approach could have been effective. One was the Lawrence. Massachusetts, textile strike of 1912. That was sixty-one years ago. It was a famous IWW strike. Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, Joe Ettor, Arturo Giovannitti were involved in it.
Retrospectively, I recall one incidence that has a bearing on this question of whether you should utilize bourgeois-democratic institutions. At that time Victor Berger was a Socialist congressman from Milwaukee. He was the first Socialist congressman in the United States. But he was a right-winger. He was the leader you might call the ultra-right wing of the Socialist party. Notwithstanding that, the strike leaders were able to use his position to gain tremendous publicity for the strike. They cooked up a wonderful idea for publicity —to take the children of the strikers on the train to socialist sympathizers in various places to be kept during the strike. It caused a great sensation. The Lawrence authorities interfered and tried to put a stop to it. The use of the police created a furor.
Then Victor Berger introduced a resolution in Congress to investigate the Lawrence strike. He got an official committee set up, and Haywood and the leaders brought the kids and women to the congressional hearings to testify about conditions. It was a wonderful publicity job that helped win the strike.
But it was not a normal procedure. Retrospectively I see it as a good example of how to use a bourgeois parliamentary institution.
Another example I recall was in 1917 when the Socialist party came out against the war. Morris Hillquit, in the New York municipal elections that year, ran for mayor and made the war question his main issue. It got tremendous publicity across the country.
I didn't realize it then because I was still a hidebound syndicalist, but I look back on it as a wonderful illustration of how even a municipal campaign can be utilized for a national political purpose.
I really rejoice over the way our party goes into these elections, national, state, and local —any place they can get an edge in and get up some kind of an audience, newspaper space, some TV or radio time, and do it without giving away anything. That's all for free.
I see all these ultrawise, ultraleft groups. What do they do? They stand around with their mouths open while we exploit the cracks and crevices in the bourgeois-democratic system without paying the slightest respect to it. You know, they can't run a bourgeois-democratic system without giving a little opening here and there. So, we take advantage of it; and we're 100 percent right!
Q. In the history of the radical movement has there ever been a crisis in government with the kind of impact that the Nixon-Watergate crisis has had? Why do you think this Nixon thing has developed to the degree it has?
A. That's what Nixon would like to know. There have been some attempts to compare it to the Teapot Dome scandal of the Harding administration. But that was a pure-and-simple graft scandal involving cabinet members and some oil companies. Public sentiment was rather "So what? Don't they all steal?"
The Communist party ran its first presidential candidates in 1924. Foster and Gitlow were the candidates. It was only a token campaign; but one of the slogans we started out with was "Down with the Capitalist Teapot Dome!
Vote for Communist candidates for president."
Our comrades were somewhat taken aback by the reception to that. People would say, "You mean to tell us that if your guy got in there he wouldn't steal? All politicians steal." There was absolute cynicism, more or less indifference. "What the hell; so they stole a few million dollars."
I think that would have been the attitude now if Watergate had been limited to graft. What's involved in this case is the extent of the bugging, espionage, and intimidation. A large section of the population, including a large section of the middle and upper classes, got apprehensive about it.
It's not the same as the Teapot Dome scandal. There is a genuine public reaction to this scandal. You might say multiple scandals. Every day, you expect something new to be revealed.
A columnist named Kraft. Do you know him?
Q. Joseph Kraft. He's the fellow who went to Paris and was followed by the CIA, I believe.
A. He's a prominent national columnist. He wrote an article summarizing the whole thing in one of the liberal magazines. His opinion was that this Nixon outfit and the hatchetmen he had around him were actually moving in the direction of a police state. The ruling powers in this country don't think they need that yet. The opposition comes, you know, not only from the workers. It comes from practically all circles of society. The New York Times and the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are all hostile to this administration. They represent real money in this country. If there is a conflict in the upper circles, the difference between the old money and the new may be involved, I think. The new tycoons don't know where to stop; they haven't learned moderation, or the need for concessions. The older ones think it's better to give a little in order to keep a lot.
Q. When the International Labor Defense had to fight, cases like Sacco-Vanzetti and Mooney-Billings, was it able to take advantage of any divisions like that in the ruling class over how to react to the labor movement? Was it able to build up support for its cases through both mass propaganda work and things like endorsements?
A. Yes, there were many endorsements and they were utilized. Even lawyers were outraged at the violations of the rules of law. The Sacco and Vanzetti case was a frame-up. Everybody knew it was a damned frame-up from beginning to end.
The witch-hunt began in the early 1920s. There was a tremendous red scare and they arrested thousands of people overnight in the Palmer raids. They deported whole shiploads of immigrants who were suspected of subversion or of being connected in any way with the radical, movement. They just hit on Sacco and Vanzetti in the course of a general investigation. They had no case against them at all. They framed it.
The judge was outspokenly prejudicial in all his rulings and so on. They went through with it. It was delayed by one appeal after another and by public protest for seven years. It was not till 1927 that they finally executed them. And there were deep feelings in the movement of protest.
A couple of years ago a book was published that tried to justify the killing of Sacco and Vanzetti. The author tried to prove that Carlo Tresca had stated in one instance that while one of them was innocent the other was guilty. And since Carlo Tresca was a prominent anarchist, he thought that this was big news. He said also that I knew about it —that I thought they were guilty despite the fact that I was organizing the campaign of the International Labor Defense. He made these statements in The New Republic.
I immediately wrote a reply which they published under the heading "What Cannon Didn't Think."
Judge Musmano, who had been connected with the Sacco-Vanzetti Committee, and later became a prominent judge in Pennsylvania, wrote me a very, very warm letter congratulating me on my protest in The New Republic. Which is an indication he still had strong convictions about the case although he was by no means sympathetic to anarchism or any other radical idea.
Q. As a result of the tapes controversy and the whole development of this struggle around Nixon's role in Watergate, there's quite a bit of sentiment in various circles, from George Meany to radical students, to impeach Nixon. As far as I know, that's a totally new phenomenon. Do you have any opinion about how revolutionists should relate to demands for impeachment?
A. The only other case involved was that of President Johnson, who succeeded Lincoln. That was in 1866, over a hundred years ago. No, there has been nothing like the exposure of the Nixon administration.
He's committed to something that's unforgivable in the eyes of the moneyed rulers of this country. He's gone too far; he's stirred up too much trouble. They want to rule the country rather calmly. They're getting plenty of benefits the way it's working. They're not ready to use police-state methods to the extent Nixon has used them.
And then there's been some bad luck. One thing leads to another. A witness incidentally mentions to the Ervin Committee that they kept tape recordings of all the conversations. My god, is that so? Accidental things like that led from one revelation to the next.
I think our press is doing all right in covering Watergate and should keep hammering away on it from our own special viewpoint that this is just an unusually flagrant example of what capitalist rule and politics are really like.
We should watch out for oversimplification. Some issues of The Militant may have given the impression that it was being treated like another Teapot Dome scandal, "Well, they all do it; don't they?"
But Watergate goes beyond anything previous. Even Supreme Court Justice Douglas says he suspects they tapped the Supreme Court, and Johnson suspected that his phone was tapped.
If the ruling class thought all this was necessary, they would be for it, but at present they're not for such extensive use of police-state methods. So I think we should recognize this, and without making any concessions in principle, deal more fully with the way Nixon has embarrassed the real rulers of America.
But, as I say, that's marginal. It's not a fundamental criticism of our handling of the case. I think The Militant is doing very well, harping on it all they can, speaking about it all they can.
This morning I received a copy of the Workers Vanguard.
Q. That's Robertson's paper.
A. Do you know what they say on the headline? "Impeachment is not enough!" (Laughs.)
Q. He has to be hanged by the thumbs, or something?
A. (Laughs.) Returning to what the attitude of the radical movement used to be toward utilizing the judicial and parliamentary system for revolutionary purposes. Our actions used to be purely defensive. Even in the Sacco-Vanzetti case we took a defensive position. The same was (rue of the Mooney case and going all the way back to the Haymarket martyrs. They were all defensive actions.
The tendency was to say the courts are crooked, influenced by the capitalist class, and so keep away from them. For instance, the idea of utilizing the courts was not known to me. I recall distinctly in the terrible persecution of the IWW during the First World War. They arrested active Wobblies wherever they could find them. They had so many they put whole groups on trial. Around eighty to one hundred were tried in Chicago. There was another big group in Sacramento, California, and another in Kansas City, Kansas, the Witchita Case, they called it.
This gives you an idea of the decentralization of the IWW and the ultraleft approach to the question of utilizing the courts. In the Chicago and Kansas cases they put up a legal defense with lawyers. But in Sacramento they adopted the policy of a "silent defense." Did you ever hear of that?
Q. Where they refused to speak?
A. A silent defense. They didn't have any lawyers; they used no witnesses; they didn't use cross-examination. They ignored the court. They just sat there. Just to show their contempt.
They got stiff sentences like the others, but all they accomplished by their silent defense and their refusal to employ any lawyers was to lose the possibility of appealing, getting some of their people out on bail while the appeals were pending, and organizing an effective campaign. It was a negative action. It represented the prevailing attitude of the left-wing movement that you couldn't get anything out of the courts.
Now, our policy today is different. We base ourselves on the fact that it's not a police state, it's a bourgeois-democratic state, which a lot of people think is really democratic. In order to maintain that illusion the ruling class has to give you a little leeway here and there.
The intelligent thing, as Lenin explained in his pamphlet on the infantile sickness, is that we utilize these crevices for our own purposes. The suit filed by our party in the Watergate case is a very correct tactic, a serious move to exploit the bourgeois-democratic system in an offensive action in the courts. It's correctness is self-evident when you look at it.
I noticed the New York papers carried reports of the press conference about the filing of the suit. You're going around the country speaking to audiences who wouldn't be there this issue didn't appeal to them the way it does.
And what are ultralefts doing? Doing nothing except occasionally yapping at us.
Of course we should explain in our general propaganda that we don't expect to get much justice from the capitalist courts. The whole thing is rigged against us. But in order to maintain some illusion of democracy they've got to show some respect for law and order, so we'll take advantage of that and we'll test it out.
The Kutcher case is a wonderful example of how sometimes such a course can be successful.
Q. Why do you think there was such a big difference between the outcome of the Kutcher case and the outcome of the Smith Act trials of the leaders of the Communist party during the same period?
A. Well, the Smith Act trials began with our being tried in Minneapolis. All of these trials were, from the point of view of the letter of the law, illegal and unconstitutional. We were convicted of expressing certain opinions. We were not accused of any actions. The same held true for the Communist party defendants. The political climate —the war, and later the cold war —made it possible for them to get away with it. And they did. But there aren't any Smith Act cases today, are there?
Q. No.
A. We appealed to the Supreme Court. We kept out of jail for two years after our conviction with one appeal after another and the final decision was no decision at all. The Supreme Court refused to hear the case. Did you know that? So it left undecided whether the law was unconstitutional. Later they finally agreed to hear another case and threw out a large section of it. You don't hear a lot about the Smith Act trials any more.
Q. Well, the question that I was raising, the reason 1 posed it in relation to the Communist party, is that it seems to me that because of the SWP's position of political opposition to the war, there was a clear, nearly unanimous sentiment on the part of the capitalist class that the SWF should be prevented from expressing that point of view. But later, during the witch-hunt, Jimmy Kutcher, a member of the SWP, gained enough support to win, while members of the CP like the Rosenbergs and the Smith Act defendants were virtually isolated. Obviously the question of their relationship to the Soviet Union during the cold-war period of "containing Communism" had something to do with it, but I wondered if there were other questions involved.
A. I don't give the ruling class credit for unanimity of opinion in everything they do. Different judges act in different ways, and the Communist party was particularly unpopular during the cold war because of their connection with the Soviet Union. The witch-hunters thought they could get away with it because of the political climate, and they did.
We're not fighting this case, I hope, with the idea that we're going to get justice. We're fighting to see if we can get a little something out of the pretense of a democratic society. If they make things absolutely airtight, and there's no chance to win any kind of a legal process and so on, then they can't make a pretense of having a democratic order. There's a great distinction between a police state and a bourgeois-democratic system. One has loopholes in it and the other is airtight, until it's overthrown.
Q. Some ultralefts have argued that it's ridiculous for socialists to try to defend legal rights that they have formally under a bourgeois government. We touched on some of those questions before in terms of the Sacramento trial of the IWW. But there are a lot of parallels between this argument and the kind of argument that it seems to me Grandizo Munis was presenting in his criticisms of your conduct in the Smith Act trial and so I wonder if you hare any comment on whether or not his criticism and your answer would have any relevance to legal actions like the SWP suit today. You were making the point that there is some necessity for the ruling class to grant some democratic rights.
A They had to grant us a trial which they wouldn't have had to do under a police state. And taking advantage of that, we used the courtroom for a forum. To do that effectively, we conducted a very prudent, dignified defense. We had our own lawyer, Albert Goldman, who was a member of the movement and on trial himself. We worked out together the questions he would ask and answers we would give. And in general we exploited the trial to the full for propaganda purposes.
I thought the Communist party made a mess of their big case in New York by engaging in so many squabbles with the judge on technicalities. The public became impatient and that hurt the defendants.
In contrast to that, our idea was just to get all the propaganda advantage possible out of the case. I don't know how long I was on the stand. Enough to make a small book. All those questions that Goldman put tome —these had all been worked out in advance. And, as far as I can remember, we didn't concede a damned thing to them. We just denied that what we were doing was illegal.
We used defensive formulas. We didn't go in there and shout for the right to use violence or anything like that. We just said the workers have a right to defend themselves and do such things as form a workers defense guard in the Minneapolis strikes.
When the prosecutor kept prodding me on it, and I kept answering defensively, I finally ended, "I think the workers have a right to defend themselves. And if that's treason, you can make the most of it!" I stood up and shouted that at them.
And the whole goddamn courtroom was stunned and he just said, "That's well spoken," and stopped.
When he questioned me about the Russian revolution, he was flabbergasted by my contention that it was a legal act. "What the devil are you talking about?" He didn't say that, but put it in lawyer's language.
I gave some more calculated arguments about revolutions and their legality, and finally said, "I don't think you'll find a more legal revolution than that!"
He said, "That's all." He just threw up his hands. "That's all."
The pamphlet we made of that testimony has been the most circulated of all our publications. I've been told many times that it's most effective in talking with new contacts: Socialism on Trial.
Q. I think it's being reissued along with the debate with Munis.
A. Yes, I've heard that.
Q. I have one other question. We've had a lot of experience with defense committees like the one we've set up in this case, the Political Rights Defense Fund. I'd like to know more about the ILD. How did that idea develop? Did it come from some earlier experience in the radical movement in the United States, or was it from international experience?
A. You might say it came about by accident. There was a tradition in America of solidarity in defense cases. The IWW had a defense committee called the General Defense Committee. It was strictly an IWW committee.
Going back to the Haywood case, where I first became involved in the movement as a 16-year-old kid in 1906. The Socialist party in those days was pretty strong and growing, and The Appeal to Reason, the socialist paper, with half a million circulation, made the Haywood trial the weekly front-page event.
Then—I don't know where it originated but it proliferated all over the country — Moyer-Haywood conferences were held of delegated bodies of the Socialist party, sympathetic trade unions, Workmen Circles, and so on. Meetings and demonstrations were organized for the defense of Haywood.
He was made candidate for the governor of Colorado while he was on trial. That was a very good stunt.
They employed the best lawyers. Clarence Darrow headed the defense. He was big news himself, he was so famous. The central national defense was controlled by the union because they had to collect a lot of money.
The general procedure was that when someone was arrested, his own organization would set up a defense committee. They'd ask for the support of others, but they didn't broaden out the defense committee. The Sacco-Vanzetti defense committee, in fact, was a little group of Boston anarchists, who kept tight control of everything. The campaign didn't get under way until the International Labor Defense came in on the propaganda side. We didn't participate on the legal and financial side.
In the early twenties, after the uprisings that followed the Russian revolution, the Russian party first set up an organization of their own in Russia to collect funds and so on for the victims of the white terror in Eastern Europe.
In early 1925, when we were there to attend a plenum, a proposal was made to organize international support for the victims of the white terror. The organization was to be called the International Red Aid. It's primary function would be to collect funds and to protest on behalf of the victims of the white terror. We talked about this in our delegation. We had the custom of congregating in Bill Haywood's room in the Hotel Lux. Bill Haywood and I were talking about it one day, and we came up with, "By God, we ought to do something about the American prisoners." There were a lot of them. There were over a hundred men still in jail from the old prosecution, and new criminal-syndicalist prosecutions were under way in various states. "We ought to do something about the Americans. We ought to broaden this thing out and make the committee take responsibility for the American prisoners — really Americanize the American section."
The more we talked about it, the more the idea took hold. I was then a member of the Political Committee of the Communist party and all I had in mind was just to promote the idea. Get it accepted in Moscow and then, when we came back, have the PC endorse it, take the initiative, get hold of somebody, and do it.
Well, when we got back, I went before the Political Committee for the first meeting, explained what had developed in Moscow, what the proposal was. The fact is that while we were in Moscow, they had sent delegates to the different countries to promote the International Red Aid idea. Their representative here had presented a formal motion that the PC support it. International Red Aid membership cards had already been printed. A very quiet, inoffensive operation—they were going to organize a few committees, get a few dollars for the victims, and let it go at that.
Well, my idea was to expand the operation and make something out of it. The committee immediately adopted my plan. "My idea," I said, "is not only just to have party members. Let's go out and get some prominent people to support it."
There was a defense committee in Pittsburgh on a special case there. There was a defense committee in Chicago on some still pending case of the Communist party. Some old Wobblies might become interested because they had friends still in prison.
I got Ralph Chaplin interested. He wasn't active in the IWW but he was sympathetic. And so were two or three other prominent ex-Wobblies. An ex-Wobbly was not somebody who had repudiated the movement, but somebody who had simply dropped out for personal reasons. They were well-known people.
We made them members of the Executive Committee. And in fact in the Executive Committee, as we laid it out in our plans, the majority would consist of nonmembers of the Communist party, people who were sympathetic to the general idea.
The more we talked about it, the more enthusiasm grew. We finally decided that we wouldn't just proclaim this committee; we would organize a national conference to launch the International Labor Defense. We projected publishing a magazine. As I say, the thing simply got out of hand. I recall one meeting just before the conference was called. We were laying out the plans and came to a point about the secretary of the Chicago Defense Committee possibly being named national secretary. Some Wobbly said, "Uh, uh; you got it all wrong."
"What do you mean?"
"You're going to be secretary. You want us to hustle? Well, we're not going to hustle for some fellow we don't know. We know you and we'll support you."
Then it became evident to everybody that I had gotten so deeply involved in the thing and I was so much better known than ^any of the other potential candidates that I would have to take over. I had never planned on that at all.
Then Rose Karsner said she would like to come in and run the office. She was the head of another organization called the International Workers Aid, which had originally been called the Friends of Soviet Russia. It was organized during the famine of 1921 and had continued as a fund-raising organization for different countries and different movements in need of financial help, where there were famines and persecution, etc.
Q. So it had a separate office with its own staff?
A. Yes. We were going to set up a national office with a secretary and an office manager. We planned it as a big operation. She would come in and run the office so that I'd be free to travel and organize locals and one thing or another.
So it culminated in a good-sized first national conference of the International Labor Defense. We had the endorsement of a lot of prominent people, including Upton Sinclair. We announced that we were defending all prisoners — what we called class-war prisoners — in connection with labor. And there were quite a bunch of them. There was a large number of IWWs in different cases. Mooney and Billings were in prison. The Centralia fight had resulted in a dozen Wobblies being imprisoned. Then we discovered that in Texas, Cline and Rangel, who had been helping Mexican revolutionists, had been framed up and were serving long sentences. In San Quentin were a lot of people who had been sent up under state criminal-syndicalist laws. Up in Maine there was a case. It added up to about 140 people. We said we will help all of them; we'll raise money to send a monthly stipend of $5 a month to every prisoner for commissary.
A commissary is a place in prison where you can buy a little extra stuff. It's very important. You get the routine meal. But if you have a little money you can buy candy bars, cigarettes, cookies, apples, oranges, and things like that. It makes a big difference.
We would send $5 a month to each prisoner and we would send $25 a month to their families, if they had a family. Then we would plan — without promising definitely — we would plan to raise a Christmas fund to give a bonus of $25 or $50 to every prisoner for Christmas. We would publicize all their cases through our magazine and other media. It was a very enthusiastic national conference.
The plan outlined in the constitution made it a membership organization. Anybody sympathetic to the cause could join. Ten cents a month dues and donate whatever you could and if you had a little extra money, send it in to the national office.
We organized locals all over the country and not only that, we put in full-time district organizers in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and places like that—Cleveland. Full-time organizers! They coordinated local branches and stirred up activity. The thing took hold and was quite well received.
In 1925 we started the Labor Defender. It was an illustrated monthly magazine. In the magazine, on which Max Shachtman was the editor and worked full time, we decided to revive all the old cases. We told the story of the Haymarket martyrs, and Mooney and Billings. We put out a special edition on the lynching of Frank Little in Butte, Montana. We publicized the Sacco-Vanzetti case and campaigned on other cases. It was the most popular magazine in the radical movement. Sold wider than the party press.
The second national conference was in 1926. Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was brought in. She had been very prominent in the IWW. She became national chairwoman and was sent on a national tour. The third national conference in 1927 was held under the slogan: "Third National Conference of the International Labor Defense, Fortieth Anniversary of the Haymarket Martyrs." Lucy Parsons, the widow of the martyr, was the guest of honor. These things were very effective in stimulating a sense of solidarity in the radical movement.
And throughout all that period we kept up our obligation. We sent $5 a month to every one of the one hundred prisoners regardless of what organization they belonged to; but we didn't send it over the head of their own committee. For example, for members of the IWW, we sent it in a lump sum to their general defense committee to distribute; so that we were not interfering with the work of any of the other committees.
Our work was propaganda and agitation, and legal defense only if it was needed. Quite a few cases were brought to us and we had quite a number of those. Our Christmas fund was very popular.
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