In Defense Of The October Russian Revolution Of 1917- Comrade Markham’s Tale-Take Two
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Comrade Markham had been born a “red diaper baby.” I will explain what that means in a minute but first to that Comrade Markham moniker. That name is the only name I have known him by ever since I ran into him at an anti-war planning session over in Cambridge a couple of years back, back in the fall of 2012, when we were trying, people like Comrade Markham, the guys from Veterans for Peace, guys and gals from some socialist groups and the usual Quakers, traditional peace activists who always sign on to these efforts, to organize against the latest governmental war cries. Although the previous decade or so had seen anti-war mobilizations, great and small, mainly small, this session was planning a rally to oppose President Obama’s then latest attempt to intervene in the civil war in Syria. Comrade Markham, then eighty-seven years old and still trying to change this wicked old world for the better rather than sitting in some assisted living hellhole wasting away, had introduced himself to the group under that moniker and although I had not seen him around before, had no sense of his history then, others greeted and addressed him by that name without a snicker.
Of course as I found out later that moniker was not his real name but had been the one that he had used in his long-time membership in the old American Communist Party, not the current version which is kind of out in limbo, but the one that we who came of age in the 1960s had cut our teeth on as the great “red menace,” who were taking “Moscow gold,” taking Stalin and his progeny’s gold, in order to undermine the American way of life and so we had to be ever vigilant in the red scare Cold War night. He had used the name so long that he knew no other to be called and in my associations with him as he told me his story that is what I always called him. Someday I suppose we will find out his real name but his story, an unusual American story, is what matters and what will be forever his memorial.
But back to that “red diaper baby” designation I promised to tell you about. Now I had heard that designation before, back in the late 1960s when Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) was cutting a big swath through the political landscape, especially among students. That was the time when even some of us who came straight from the working-classes to be the first in our families to go to college believed that students comfortably ensconced in ivory tower “red” universities had replaced the working class and oppressed of the world as the center of progressive action. A fair number of the emerging leaders, again some who also were out of working class neighborhoods in places like Chicago, Detroit, New York City and Oakland, had had parents who belonged to the Communist Party or some other left-wing organization and were not like many of us the first generation of radicals in our families. Thus the “red diaper baby” designation which in some cases gave those who had grown up in that political milieu an unwarranted standing based on some usually long past affiliation by their now bourgeois (or better for working class kids bourgeoisified) parents. What has made Comrade Markham unique in my experience is that he was a red diaper baby from parents who had helped establish the Communist Party in America back around 1920 (or one of the two that emerged from the old Socialist Party but that story of the hows and whys of the existence of two parties are beyond what I want to tell you about here except in passing).
That thread of history intrigued me, his whole story intrigued me as I pieced it together in bits and pieces, and so after a couple of those planning sessions I asked him to sit down with me wherever he liked and tell me his story. We did so in several sessions most of them held in the Boston Public Library where he liked go and check out books, magazines and newspapers about the old days, about the time of his activist political prime. What I did not expect to get was an almost chemically pure defense of the Soviet Union, of the Soviet experience, through thick and thin until the end in 1990 or so. And of a longing for the days when such questions mattered to a candid world. I admit I shared some of his nostalgia, some of his sense that while this wicked old world needs a new way of social relations to the means of production we are a bit wistful in our dreams right now. That is why his story appears here as a running personal commentary on this 97th anniversary year of the Russian October Revolution of 1917.
It is probably hard today at least three generations removed from the time of the great Russian October Revolution of 1917 to understand, to understand in depth. the strong pro-revolutionary feeling that that event brought forth in the world- the first fitful workers’ state, a state for the international working-class to call its own, to defend against all the international reaction. Of course that strong pro-revolutionary response also has its opposite effect on the international bourgeoisie which was ready to move might and main to break the back of the revolution and did so, did actively attempt, one way or another, supporting one native anti-revolutionary faction or another, or intervening directly. (The international bourgeoisie had as its allies as well some of the reformist leaderships and better off segments of the Western working class who were as fearful of revolution as any bourgeois). This was the heady atmosphere in which Comrade Markham’s parents, known in the party as Comrade Curtis and Comrade Rosa (after the late martyred Polish revolutionary liked after the failed Spartacist uprising in Germany in late 1918, Rosa Luxemburg, the rose of the revolution), moved in the early days of the party formed here in America.
See Curtis and Rosa had a long socialist past, had grown up respectively in a Kansas farm belt (him) and a Chicago steel belt (her), had worked individually to build the pre-World War I Socialist Party in their respective places of birth and had met in Chicago when Curtis moved there to work on the 1912 presidential campaign for the revered Eugene V. Debs (who amassed over one million votes that years, a watershed year for socialist votes, gathered in large part by activists like Curtis and Rosa who worked overtime for his election). They had been aligned with the left-wing of the party in most of its internal debates and votes, especially as President Woodrow Wilson and his administration started beating the war drums to go to the aid of the Allies in the utterly stalemated World War I. A war where the flower of the European youth had laid down their heads for no apparent reason and Wilson was preparing the same fate for American youth. Segments of the party wanted to support those efforts or to “duck” the issue. So they were strongly for him and his supporters when Debs decided to outright oppose the war entry publicly in 1917. Naturally they were rounded up and went to jail for a time (at this time they also had also gotten married in order to be able to visit whichever one was in jail at any given time) and became more closely associated with the left-wing that was forming to defiantly oppose American entry into the war but also a myriad of policies that the right-wing leadership (socialist right-wing not generic right-wing) had imposed on the party.
The pre-war Socialist Party in America like a lot of socialist parties around the world then had been based on the working class but had also been reliant on other classes like farmers and urban professionals, especially during electoral periods. So the American organization was a loose organization. Loose until faction fight time, or when the leadership felt some threat and pulled the hammer down on party discipline usually gunning for elements to their left but sometimes just any opposition that might vie for party power which encompassed many divergent elements. Elements that were not always on the same page. Comrades Curtis and Rosa had to laugh when the old time Socialist Party leadership used as its calling-card its looseness as against the Bolshevik iron vice. They knew first-hand that leadership did not play second fiddle to anyone where bureaucratic abuse occurred.
The biggest organizations, better to say federations, were the Midwestern farmers, those sturdy wheat and corn farmers from Kansas, Iowa, Oklahoma who had moved over from the defunct Populist and Greenback parties who could not keep up with the times, the foreign language federations which included both American citizens and recent immigrants who were merely transferring their socialist loyalties from their native parties to the American one , and a smaller grouping of what I would call “natives” who had been around America for a few generations and who were city dwellers or worked in city professions like lawyering, journalism, medicine and the like. These three rather heterogeneous groups and what happened to them later are important to Comrade Markham’s parents’ story since they were both native born and his father had been a law clerk (after he left the farm and got some clerkship for a lawyer in Kansas City) and his mother a school teacher (her steelworker father working overtime to put her through Chicago Normal School as the first of her family to go to college).
A fair number of the foreign language federations were opposed to American entry into the war, as were farmers and the professionals and as noted a fair number were rounded up and went to jail (or like with the IWW, Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies, anarchist workers were deported quickly if their immigration status was shaky). What started the big fights inside the party, what got Comrades Curtis and Rosa up in arms, was what attitude to take toward the Russian revolution. Not so much the February 1917 revolution which overthrew the useless Czar but the Bolshevik-led October revolution which its leaders, Lenin and Trotsky, proclaimed as the first victory in the international battle to make socialism the new way to produce and distribute the world’s goods. The party split into several factions over this issue but what is important is that Curtis and Rosa found themselves working with other “natives,” guys like Jim Cannon, John Reed, Earl Browder, Jack Johnstone, some of the New York union leaders, and many party writers who saw the Russian October as the new wave for humankind and were ready to move might and main to defend that revolution against all comers. That is the baptism of fire that the as yet unborn Comrade Markham had in his genes.
Some say that the events around the left-wing’s expulsion from the Socialist Party, or rather what those leftist did, or did not do, to get themselves expelled, did not bode well for those who would go on to form the American Communist parties (yes, plural as two separate parties, one based roughly on the foreign language federations, especially the Russian, Finnish, and Slavic, and the other around the “natives,” the faction Curtis and Rosa worked with as noted above). There is always a tension when great events occur and there is an impassable division of the house over the issues and so whether the split/expulsion was premature or necessary was not under the control of the ousted faction. Sure, staying in would have produced a better, clearer explanation for why a split was necessary in the post-October world. But the Russians were setting up a Communist International in which they recognized, taking their own experiences in Russian socialist politics as a guide, that in the age of imperialism, that the “party of the whole class,” the socialist “big tent” where everybody who called themselves socialists found a home was no longer adequate as a revolutionary instrument to seize state power and begin the socialist agenda. Comrades Curtis and Rosa had done yeoman’s work in Chicago and New York to round up all the supporters of the Russian revolution they could before the hammer came down. Although they were not in the first rank of left-wing leaders they were just below that and had a certain authority having served jail time for their anti-war views. Some of the few “natives” who faced that choice.
As mentioned above some of the organizations which had been affiliated with the Socialist Party were not on the same page. That fact was equally true of the groupings who would try to form an American Communist Party. This is the place where the differences between the foreign language federations and the “natives” came to the fore (again these are rough divisions of the social basis of the antagonistic groupings as there was some overlap as usual). So for a few years there were two parties, both underground at the beginning given the heat from the American bourgeoisie who were apoplectic about the revolution in Russia (including armed intervention there) and unleased the Palmer Raids to round up every red under every bed and kill them through vigilante action, deport them or jail them (named after the Attorney-General of the time). Mostly Curtis and Rosa kept a low profile, worked clandestinely (having already seen American jails they were leery of going back and one could not blame them, especially Rosa who had a hard time having been placed with the common criminal women for lack of other facilities and who had to fend off one woman who wanted to make Rosa her “girl”), tried to keep the press published and distributed, and tried to fight against all the various “theories” that basically ignorant American comrades had about the “virtues” of an underground party which the foreign language federations were in favor of. The issue of the legal/underground party finally after a few years of controversy had to be resolved by the Russians, by the Communist International, hell, by Trotsky himself. So for a time Comrades Curtis and Rosa had a very high opinion of that Russian leader, that victorious leader of the Red Army, especially after Jim Cannon came back with the favorably verdict and how it was arrived at. If anything, according to Comrade Markham’s recollections of what his parents told him about the founding days of the party they became even more fervent about defense of the Russian revolution and spent a great deal of time during the early years propagandizing for American governmental recognition of the Soviet Union.
The early 1920s say up to about 1924 were hectic for the American Communist Party, hectic until the Communist International straightened out that dispute between the “legal” party and “underground” party factions noting that the changed political climate allowed the party to act more openly (the frenzy of the red scare Palmer raid days abated in the “lost generation,” “Jazz Age ”days but where the “dog days” of political struggle of the 1920s in the labor movement were then also descending on the American landscape). The hard “under-grounders” had departed leaving those who wanted to increase the public face of the party able to do so without rancor (of course other disputes would rise up to enflame the factions but that is another story). Still the party in many ways was rudderless, had not kept pace with what was going on in the Communist International. Nowhere was this problem more apparent than the whole question of supporting a farmer-labor party in the 1924 presidential elections, in short, to support that old progressive Republican, Robert Lafollette, in his independent campaign.
The impulse was to make a big public splash on the national scene with the advantages that the exposure of a national campaign would bring. Both Comrades Curtis and Rosa having been public activists and strong supporters of the idea pushed Jim Cannon and his co-thinker, Bill Dunne, toward support for the idea. Cannon and Dunne a little more knowledgeable about American bourgeois organizations were lukewarm after the Chicago labor leaders balked and began a red-baiting campaign. Curtis and Rosa saw that campaign as a way to publicize the campaign for American recognition of the Soviet Union. The problem with support for a farmer-labor party, a two-class party is that the thing is a bourgeois formation, an early version of what in the 1930s would become the “popular front” policy. The name and reputation of Lafollette should have been the tip-off. So most of the year 1924 was spent in trying to iron out the problem of whether to support a farmer-labor party or just a labor party. The internal politics of this dispute are important. No less an authority on the early party than Cannon said later that a wrong decision (to support Lafollette or some version of that idea) would have destroyed the party right then. The CI stepped in and changed the policy not without controversy. Comrades Curtis and Rosa were not happy, certainly not happy with Cannon then but deferred to the factional leadership’s judgment. They spent most of that year doing trade union support work for William Z. Foster’s Trade Union Education League drawing closer to that leader as a result although still aligned with the Cannon faction.
Comrade Markham was a “love” baby. (He had his parents word on this when he asked some child’s question about it later when he was first learning about sex.) A “love baby” in the days when most ideas of contraception, even among knowledgeable revolutionaries connected with the Village and other places where such things might be discussed, was some variation of the old Catholic “rhythm” method dealing with a woman’s cycle (both Curtis and Rosa had been brought up as Catholics). After the hectic times around the farmer-labor question the pair decided to bring a child into the world, into their world and so Rosa stopped counting the days in her cycle. And in the fall of 1925 Markham was born, born and nurtured by two happy parents.
Part of Comrade Curtis and Rosa’s decision to have a child was determined by the low level of class struggle in America at the time (and world-wide especially after the aborted German revolution of 1923 which while they were not familiar with the details had sensed that something big had been missed). Labor strikes were few and far between, the party message was not getting much of a hearing outside the New York area, and the Coolidge administration was adamant about not recognizing “red” Russia. Moreover after the death of Lenin and the struggle for power in the Soviet party between Stalin and Trotsky (and in the Communist International where Zinoviev was in a bloc with Stalin against Trotsky) some of the wind went out of the sails for Comrade Curtis and Rosa, a not unknown phenomenon in the “dog days” of any movement. So while they remained good party members, paid their dues and sold the paper on Saturdays, remained loyal to the defense of Soviet Russia they were less active in those years when they were raising Markham over in Brooklyn after moving from Chicago looking for work where Curtis had found a job as a law clerk and started taking stenographic courses to bring some income into the household rather than depending on parents and the party dole.
Comrades Curtis and Rosa had in the first few years of Comrade Markham’s life, the late 1920s, not been as attentive to what was going on in Russia as previously. Were unaware of the details of the internal struggle started after the death of Lenin in 1924 between Stalin and Trotsky at first and then eventually the whole of the old Bolshevik Party, those who had actually made the revolution rather that those who were emerging as Stalin’s allies, those who had sat on the sidelines (or on the other side) or who were Johnny-come-latelies and had no sense of party history. Although they had adhered to various factional line-ups lashed together by the Cannon-Dunne section of the party leadership they had not been as attuned during the mid to late 1920s of the way that the changes in the political situation in Moscow was reflected in the changes in the American party. It was almost as if once they had genuflected before their duty to the defense of the Soviet Union the rest of the situation there receded into vague rumors and esoteric theory.
Although early on they had been admirers of the Red Army leader, Leon Trotsky, once he became anathema in party circles in Russia they took their cues from the newly installed Lovestone leadership in the American party (and the Cannon faction as well) and were as adamant in their ritualistic denunciations of the person of Trotsky and of the Trotskyite menace as anyone. His criticism of the Stalin regime seemed like sour grapes to them and his rantings about the failure of leadership in the British trade union crisis and second Chinese revolution did not resonate with them being in a country like America where the possibilities of revolution for the foreseeable future seemed extremely remote and therefore it was impolitic for others to speak about such matters in other countries. They would pass on these same pieces of wisdom to Comrade Markham when he came of age.
They were thus shocked, shocked but not moved, when it was discovered that one of the main leaders of their faction, Jim Cannon, who had been sent to Moscow for the Sixth Congress of the Communist International in1928 came back and proved to be, or have been all along, a closet Trotskyite “wreaker.” Here too they made their ritualistic denunciations of the counter-revolutionary Cannon and would spent the rest of their political lives denouncing him and whatever political formations he helped organize to spread Trotsky’s words. This hatred too they passed on to their son.
The late 1920s and early 1930s, the time of the great world-wide economic Depression were hard times for Comrades Curtis, Rosa and their son although not because of the direct effects of that sore (everybody needs law clerks and teachers) but because it portended a change in party doctrine as mandated by the Communist International. They had always been public activists and thus ran into other left-wing groupings in their work, especially the still influential Socialist Party (mainly with the urban labor bureaucracy and the beset farmers out in the prairies). Got along with such groups, excepting of course the now banished counter-revolutionary Trotskyites who were to be beaten down if possible and an occasional Wobblie who still hadn’t gotten over the demise of that organization.
The new policy, which came down in Communist International history as the “third period” (the first being the immediate revolutionary period after World War I and the second, the mid-1920s stabilization of world capitalism), dictated that the world-wide Depression signaled the “final conflict” with capitalism and therefore any truck with non-communist forces now deemed to be “social-fascists” was forbidden. Moreover communist trade union cadre were told to create out of whole cloth “revolutionary unions.” Since party influence except in a few cities and a few unions, mainly in New York City, was minimal those policies only added to that isolation and with the exception of some stellar labor defense work and black defense work (the Scottsboro boys) done in spite of the party dictates this was an unfruitful period. The only other bright spot was in 1933 when the newly-elected Roosevelt (himself earlier a “social-fascist” as well) formally recognized the Soviet Union.
These were trying and mainly isolated times for the party, for the comrades and, frankly, for the gullible like Comrade Curtis and Rosa who would nightly talk about the nearness of their socialist dreams. Well, no question the period was bleak but the hard reality was that those Communist International doctrines (dictated by the now all-powerful Stalin and his cronies) led in their own way to the victory of the Nazis in Germany which would within the decade cause many tough nights worrying about the fate of the Soviet Union. Here is where the gullible part came in. Instead of blaming Stalin (or Earl Browder who took charge of the party as a well-known hack ready to do anything to advance himself although in his youth he had been an ardent militant and fervent anti-war supporter) Comrades Curtis and Rosa did somersaults to blame everybody and everything on socialists, Trotskyites, anybody. They never said word one about what happened in Germany and whose policies let Hitler in. Comrade Markham heard that kind of talk around the house as he grew up, as he became a Young Pioneer when he came of age.
The early 1930s, years of party-imposed self-isolation from the main political arenas, the “third period” years mentioned above, were hard years for Comrades Curtis and Rosa. They had been used to a useful and somewhat productive political life since they had moved to New York City in the 1920s. They did not get back to that normalcy until well after the Hitler threat to the Soviet Union or, better, the perceived threat since Hitler made no bones about liquidating the “Bolshevik menace” and hence made Stalin and his coterie change course dramatically with the policy which would later be codified as the “popular front.” For all practical purposes that “third period” policy had been shelved well before, probably in America with the great Communist-led general strike in San Francisco for a goodly part of 1934.
The implications were rather dramatic. Now yesterday’s “social-fascists,” including certain bourgeois elements were to be courted and the theory of the “catastrophic” end of world capitalism put on the back burner. Of course the damn Trotskyites, who had led their own general strike in backwater Minneapolis, were still to be beaten down and no party meeting (or Young Pioneer meeting either) was complete without some ritualistic denunciation of the bastards. No question though that the “thaw” as Comrade Curtis called it was welcome to that family and no more fervent supporters of the new policy in the city rank and file could be found than that pair. They took on more party responsibilities as this decade moved on (and as Comrade Markham became older and could travel with them to paper sales, meetings, and contact sessions, sessions to gain new recruits). This new energy came in handy with the outbreak of civil war in Spain where the popular front government was besieged by an armed Army/Fascist uprising and the Soviet Union was the only country willing to send military aid to drive the reactionaries back. Those were the days when Comrade Rosa would help the young activist Ethel Greenglass (later Ethel Rosenberg martyred along with her husband Julius in the Cold War 1950s executed as heroic Soviet spies) collecting funds for Spain in Times Square while Ethel performed the tarantula. Yes those who supported the Spanish Republic were kindred in those days and the young Comrade Markham got his first taste of public communist work.
The time of the new Communist International policy, the popular front against fascism with all anti-fascist forces, including bourgeois forces, was a fruitful time for the now aging Comrades Curtis and Rosa who whatever they saw in that strategy in terms of defense of the Soviet Union also saw as a way to mix with kindred in the various committees that the party was forming with other organizations. For them it was a breath of fresh air after the “third period.” Comrade Markham also got immersed in the new milieu, mixing with members of other student organizations to fight against fascism and the threat of a new war that seemed almost imminent by 1939 with the defeat in Spain hanging over everybody.
War would come soon enough, soon enough in Europe, in September 1939 and before that Comrades Curtis and Rosa spared no efforts to rally the anti-Nazi forces and to berate the isolationists who wanted nothing to do with the war in Europe.
Then the other shoe fell, fell as it had several times before when the announcement came that Stalin and Hitler had signed a non-aggression pact, and had agreed to divide Poland up. Overnight, maybe faster, the anti-fascist front was abandoned, the new slogan was peace and non-intervention. The Communist Party could now join hands with the anti-interventions America First-ers to keep America out of a European war. Overnight as well the Comrades lost many friends who could not understand the switch in policy. Worse there was an exodus from the party of many intellectuals and others who had joined the party in the spirit of the popular front who wanted no truck with Hitler alliances. Those withdrawals would not help them later when the post-war red scare came but then reflected their disgust with Soviet foreign policy.
Comrade Curtis and Rosa having been through the previous twists and turns of the party did not question the switch in fact thought that it was a clever move by Stalin to protect the Soviet Union against the British and French imperialists. All Comrade Markham knew was that he was laughed at or scorned at school but he too although only a young teenager thought Stalin had acted correctly even if he could not have articulated that feeling as well as his parents. He would learn.
“That bastard Hitler and his damn Nazis have invaded the Soviet Union, can you believe that after all Comrade Stalin did to try to keep the socialist fatherland out of the second European conflagration which had been going on for almost two years now,” cried out Comrade Curtis to his son, his now teenage son, who would probably bear the family brunt of this new world catastrophe on that fateful June 1941 when the world, the world communist world anyway, was turned upside down.
When Rosa came home from work she was beside herself since she had stopped by the Brooklyn party headquarters to see what the latest grim news was from the quickly folding and crumbling Russian front as the Nazi troops made their familiar quick work of attacking with lightning speed leaving the totally unprepared Red Army prostrate. It would only come out later, at least Comrades Curtis and Rosa did not find out about until after Stalin’s death in 1953, that Comrade Stalin and his staff had been forewarned of the attack by the international Soviet spy network that the Nazi attack was imminent and one source had actually given exact date. The damn Trotskyists over in the Village would have a field day with that since they had been saying for years that the purge of the Red Army in the late 1930s and that failure to heed the spies warnings proved, if further proof was necessary, that Stalin was responsible for the deaths of many millions at the hands of the on-rushing Nazis.
But in June 1941, in the immediate aftermath of the debacle the comrades had no time (or inclination) to question the wisdom of Soviet foreign policy moves as the socialist fatherland was in danger, must be defended at all costs, a call that both the long time comrades had paid especial heed to. So instead of calling for vague appeals to world peace, instead of calling for the American government to stay out of the European conflict, a position the party had shared prior to June, 1941 with the American First movement which included many of the most reactionary and ant-Soviet elements in American ruling and elite circles, they were urging FDR to extend Lend-Lease to the Soviets. Their world that month had indeed turned upside down.
During the period before the American entry into what would be called World War II, before Pearl Harbor Curtis, Rosa and the now politically maturing Markham were among the most active advocates of American entry into the war, of extending Lend-Lease to the Soviets for they were quite fearful that the Soviet experiment was finished after reading the daily reports of defeat and retreat. That short period came to an end quickly enough and having earlier in the year been the most fervent advocates in the streets of New York for non-intervention they now declared that everybody, everything had to go to the American war effort, that, in essence, the class struggle had to be suspended for the duration. They willingly parroted the party line that every good trade unionist should be supporting the “no strike” pledge (ironically the party had boosted its credentials by leading, or helping to lead, strikes right up until June, 1941. Personally they all followed the news from the Russian front all through the war but certainly breathed a sigh of relief when the Soviets would retreat no further and in the winter of 1943 the German forces were broken before Stalingrad. They also were out on the streets of New York calling for the opening of a “second front” to relieve the Soviets who were bearing the bulk of the burden on the eastern (that second front, a western front, would come as Normandy).
The gloom of 1941 was turning around by 1943 as even non-military types like our comrades could see that the Germans were overextended.
Closer to home in 1943 as Markham drew closer to his eighteenth birthday he as a good young communist wanted to join the American Army to go fight the Nazis (while his parents would soften up their language and call the main enemy Germans rather than Nazis Markham would always, even when I interviewed him, refer to the main enemy as Nazis with a certain twist like the German people even today could be tarred with that long ago brush). Curtis and Rosa had been able to talk him out of going in at seventeen (when they would have had to sign off on his enlistment) saying that he should finish high school so that he would have more to offer to the defense of the Soviet Union but they now had to accept the inevitable that their son would be enlisting soon and like any parents, Soviet defense or not, they feared for his fate. So in late 1943 Markham was down in Fort Dix (nor far from home anyway Rosa said, with a lurking hope that maybe the war would be over before the year was out) where he was a model soldier (that Pioneer and Young Communist League training had paid off). Then after the initial thrusts of the Normandy invasion had eaten up men and materials at prodigious rates Markham shipped out on the troop transports as a member of a unit of the Big Red One-First Division. He saw enough fighting in Europe to garner a fistful of medals (and as he told me he had had enough of fighting for those many months to last a life time). He said he would always point to that service as decisive in his commitment to defend the Soviet Union. Yeah, Markham said that those were good times with the camaraderie, and the join efforts to knock off the Nazis.
Curtis and Rosa expected, finally expected, that an “era of good feeling” would accompany the end of the war in Europe after all the Americans and Russians had been allies. Believed that, finally, the damn capitalists, the damn imperialists, would leave the Soviet Union alone. Markham was more sanguine, knew that the way the war had ended with their “spheres of interest” intact after much bargaining that the temporary allies could not go on as such forever. (Markham, having had plenty of time to read away from New York and the campaign-a-day atmosphere, read the classic Marxist texts, including lots of Lenin and was living in the world of realpolitik unlike his parents who had been buffered by every turn in the world situation.)
And then the other shoe, other shoes began to fall. First the reds were being purged from the trade unions that they had helped build, then loyalty oaths were being required in the professions (“are you now, or have you ever been a “red”)and wherever else they could intimidate and cower any leftists. The freeze, what became known as the Cold War, came fast and furious and almost swept up everybody before it, especially party leaders who were being rounded up like America was some latter day Germany.
Then, just when it seemed that things could not get any more frosty, old party members who had been recruited when the popular front “good fellows, well met” policy was in effect, had not flinched at the Hitler-Stalin Pact and left, were proud to be party members during the war saw the writing on the wall, saw that the new world order had no place for them as party members started leaving the party. Worse, worst of all, many of the intellectuals (although not just them) rather than just fade to academia, the union bureaucracies, or the professions, turned renegade, “dropped the dime,” snitched on their fellows. Many times without even being asked. No those were not good times and Curtis and Rosa took it hard, harder than in the 1920s when they had their youth going for them. They were so disheartened that in 1950, the start of a new decade, saw them burying their Marxist books out in the Bronx so that maybe someday somebody would find them and the struggle could continue. Yeah, it was a tough time to be a communist in America.
1953 was a tough year for Markham and his parents. First Comrade Stalin passed on, left a big hole in the world communist movement. Although Curtis and Rosa had been early party members, first as rank and filers and then as secondary local leaders, they had not, other than to accept every twist and turn of the Communist International line, Soviet foreign policy, and whatever came with the Moscow winds followed the internal events in Moscow very much from the beginning until Stalin’s end and so they were able to survive, were never accused of anti-party behavior, never threatened with expulsion. In some senses that was a remarkable feat for political people who had spent the previous forty or so years in political struggle. Markham from very early on in his life had been wrapped up with the latest controversies, had definite opinions about what the party should, and should not, do (and before that the policies of the Pioneers and Young Communist League) and was unstinting in his admiration for Stalin. No question he was until 1953 anyway looking for some paid party position in his quest to be a professional revolutionary. His parents, knowing that he had that appetite, encouraged him to keep away from too many controversies since once you were tied to a position you could be pushed out very quickly when the winds changed (they were probably thinking of the toady, Earl Browder, who right after the war made the mistake of trying to live popular front politics when the freeze was coming and was dumped in about two seconds when the deal went down). With Stalin’s death lots of things might change, despite the continuing freeze in world politics.
Closer to home and more threatening for Curtis and Rosa was the pending execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (nee Greenglass) as Soviet spies, as those who defended the Soviet Union in the best way they could which apparently was to gather intelligence about the development of the atomic bomb in America. The party had initially taken a hands-off attitude on the case, fearing blow-back in the red scare Cold War night. Rosa remembered back to the days in Times Square when Ethel would do the tarantella and she would go around collecting funds in the audience for the Republican cause in Spain, the glory days in defense of the beloved Spanish cause. Rosa had lost contact with Ethel during the war and then afterwards when everybody was lying low she would occasionally see Ethel around before she and Julius were picked up. Once the party saw an opening to publicize the case (mainly since the Communists in Europe were leading mass demonstrations to save their lives) Rosa was tireless in working on the committee in America to save the lives of two stalwart soldiers of the socialist revolution. Alas in June 1953 after many appeals and a bid for a pardon from President Eisenhower they were executed and Rosa was crestfallen for a long time after that. Two valiant defenders of the Soviet Union gone, their children orphans.
Comrades Curtis and Rosa had watched the internal Russian party after Stalin’s death with a certain amount of detachment (Rosa never really got over the execution of Ethel Rosenberg, and would go to her own grave proclaiming Ethel’s innocence), although not Markham who still had ambitions to be a paid party functionary (a beneficiary of “Moscow gold” as some anti-communists would snicker when he mentioned such ambitions later when it was safer to do so). After the internal battle with Khrushchev emerging supreme they thought that the Soviet situation would stabilize and the work of getting back to a pre-World War II levels and life a goal worth pursuing. Then in late 1956 they would hear very persistent rumors of some kind of secret party meeting where Khrushchev, who had been his henchman, laid out the case against the huge crimes of Stalin during his reign. This hit Curtis like a thunderbolt since he had been a very strong supporter of Bill Dunne’s back in the late 1920s after Dunne broke with the Trotskyite renegade Jim Cannon who swore that Stalin had been the man for the job in Russia since Lenin’s death and that the counter-revolutionary Trotsky was nothing but a two-bit dilettante. After that period Curtis had made his peace with the Russian regime, had believed that since they were, under Stalin’s leadership, the only workers’ state working toward socialism, that any criticism from the weak and small American party was so much train smoke. And so Curtis, and to a lesser extent Rosa, followed every twist and turn of the pipe-smoking Stalin and accepted it as good coin, or as necessary.
As already explained Markham had a little more sophisticated approach to Stalin’s leadership seeing him as the “great man, ” using ruthless means if he had to in order to push the struggle forward, a man who could save Russia and hadn’t he done just that almost single-handedly in World War II against Hitler’s hordes of Nazi bastards. Although many long time party members used Khrushchev’s revelations as a way to opt out of party life (in addition to being physically tired, tired of being politically marginalized, and sick unto death of defending the party line before, or then) our three comrades sucked it up, and especially with the counter-revolutionary turmoil in Hungary justified staying in as a way to defend the Soviet Union in its new hour of need.
It is very hard to go for long periods in politics without some kind of “reward,” without some hope that what you do can make a difference in your lifetime and as Comrade Curtis and Rosa entered the 1960s they had been in certain amount of despair about the lifetime of work that they had put in without much reward. Curtis especially was tired, wanted to cut back on party work, wanted to write some stuff unrelated to the party. Rosa was more ambiguous but she sensed that she too would not mind taking a rest. Then the black civil rights movement down south flared up, and the opportunity to work in public more, to be involved with younger people who were less leery of working with communists than their parents offered a way to do some good work that might pay off in the near future, pay off with the right to vote becoming a reality. So they plugged in to that support work. Markham actually went south for extended periods and could often be seen when the television news came on hovering in the background while Doctor King, or some leader, made pronouncement to the press. That was good if now tiring work. Then Vietnam hit the waves like a big storm and the question, indirectly, of defense of the Soviet Union was presented once again since the dominos the American government were trying to avoid have falling with all their military power would accrue to the Soviet Union and so Vietnam was what would be called later a “proxy war” in the Cold War night. In 1968 just after the heroic Tet offensive had finished up and broke the American will and before the evil genius Lyndon Johnson cried “uncle” and decided to retire Comrade Curtis passed on in his sleep. Comrade Rosa passed away in 1972 after essentially retiring from political work after Curtis’ death. An era, a half century of communist life, was over.
Comrade Markham had been living on the West Coast during the late 1960s, having moved there at the request of the party to take advantage of the excellent opportunities provided by the upsurge in left-ward political activity from the civil right movement to the anti-war movement to the more recent aspect of the black liberation struggle, the defense of the Black Panthers and of his own comrade, Angela Davis, who were being targeted for their militant direct actions by the government. For a while he lived in San Francisco but as the repression of the Panthers grew he moved across the bay to Oakland to be closer to the defense efforts by the party on behalf of the Panthers. Funny, he said, at one point a couple of years before no white radicals (or any other white politicals) could approach the then exclusionist, hard black nationalist Panthers but as the “shit hit the fan” and the state geared up its vendetta against black militants and they were being jailed and murdered in numbers way out of proportion to their weight a section of the leadership put out feelers to the party in order to tap into the party’s large legal and fund-raising apparatus. Since Markham had done such defense work in the 1950s defending the party against the red scare tactics of the government and down south for the legal needs of the civil rights workers he was placed in a key position in the United Front Against Fascism, the organizational form that the defense campaign worked under. For a while until the big split in the Panthers in 1971 and the successful closing of the case against Angela Davis he had more work than he needed.
Comrade Markham although pretty forthright in talking about his parents and their relationship had for many of the interview sessions been extremely reticent to discuss his own personal life, his life outside the party. Then at one session, one session when they had not been at the library but had gone to the High Hat Grille for a couple of drinks he opened up a little. He told of his first serious affair with a non-party woman, Sarah Q., whom he had meet in college, New York University, where he went to school after the war on the GI Bill. They had planned to be married after graduation but Sarah just could not take the red-baiting and thoughts of Markham going to jail, or worse and so they separated, separated on friendly terms (and would during the 1950s when she was married to another man rekindle their affair for several years before that too flickered out when he headed south). That on and off affair was the only serious relationship he had until he met Janice L., a non-party lawyer who worked on the Panther campaign. They married in 1976 and had two children, Delores and David, neither, like many children of reds and other serious political parents, were the slightest bit interested in politics and so the relationship between father and children had been rocky at times. At the time of the interviews there was what Markham called an “armed truce” between them. The marriage, despite some tense moments in the early 1980s over his stance on Afghanistan (and a “platonic affair” with a younger party member), lasted until Janice passed away in 2008.
If the 1960s and the early 1970s were good times for leftists, for the party with many opportunities to recruit and spread the pro-Soviet word the later part of that decade saw many prospects dry up as the Vietnam War wound down (or really direct American involvement with troops on the ground wound down) and the campuses went back to their normal level of activity, sporadic. Comrade Markham had spoken several times in the interviews about various controversies in the party while he was a member, especially early on. The 1970s were another such period except rather than being about such things as the Hitler-Stalin pact or Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin it was about how the party faced the world in public. In a country where there was no significant labor party the party leadership (egged on by Moscow) felt it had to keep a close relationship with the Democratic Party in order to carry out the popular front program that the party had pursued for most of the period after World War II.
Well if you start touting the Democrats you are bound to get infected by that experience. And the party did in 1972 with the McGovern campaign. Although the party, depending on the period and the resources, fielded its own presidential candidates and did so in 1972 it came out that half the freaking central committee had voted for McGovern then instead of the party candidate. Markham had been appalled at that discovery having grown up on the idea that communists had to work with outside forces holding their noses. His parents liked to work with outside forces, liked to let them take the lead, but Markham was made of sterner stuff and he took it hard that others were soft on political opponents who essentially did not need you. Still he could not leave the party, could not fathom the idea of going over to the Socialist Workers Party and that damn Trotskyite heresy stuff.
In the world of politics, especially communist politics a lot of times you wind up reacting to some event that you did not create, had no say in putting together and so you are reduced to responding the best way you can. The controversy over the Democrats was one thing but the Soviet incursion into Afghanistan at the request of the beleaguered progressive government was of a different order. This in Markham’s mind was a question of the defense of the Soviet Union, pure and simple, against the machinations of Islamic fundamentalism who wanted their world to go back to the 8th century or something like that and of aggressive American imperialist action. Markham spent quite a bit of time arguing about the virtues of Soviet intervention from self-defense to extending the gains of the October revolution to Afghanistan and had been what in the European communist movement was called a “tankie,” one who favored intervention. That position was a tough dollar then, what with the American government not so secretly supplying the mujahedeen with weapons and other materials. A tough position even within his family, with his wife. Worse out on the streets where everybody was condemning another act of Soviet aggression. He ended this interview with this observation- given what has happened in the world, in the Middle East, in America, in Afghanistan since then, shouldn’t we have been calling for the Soviets to finish the job there, and call for international brigades like in the 1930s in Spain to go fight alongside the Red Army soldiers.
The 1980s were a turbulent time in the Soviet Union as the American imperialists under Reagan put on a full-court press militarily to attempt to drain the Soviet economy, cause discontent, and make it vulnerable to machinations from outside. Moreover the leadership changes to younger men in the Russian party with “new” ideas about fixing the economy and permitting more internal political freedoms appeared to be a necessary corrective. At least early on in the Gorbachev regime Markham had been willing to see what would happen but as the decade turned and the decision was made to get out of Afghanistan without a win he began to turn his position into back into a harder old-time Stalinist position (his term), started to see that as the situation in Poland and East Germany deteriorated and the counter-revolution was successful that the Soviet Union was in mortal danger. And for once there was nothing he could about it. He said he had never in over almost sixty years of party life felt so helpless. So when the Yeltsin coup occurred he knew that his beloved Soviet experiment, flaws and all, was over. The gloating of world imperialism over that fact, “the end of history” as they liked to express it in their haunts, especially by the CIA, was the final kick in the teeth.
After the shock of the demise of the Soviet Union wore off a bit Markham said that he had had to take stock of his life, a bit. He had been a political animal (his term) almost since he was in those vaunted “red diapers,” had seen good and bad times politically but had always been rooted in that Soviet defense instilled in him by his parents, and so now that his visas were foreshortened he had not been sure what to do. He hung around the party for a few more years but those were tough years to try, like his parents had in their youth, to create a “new” communist party that would be able to better respond to the new world of the 21st century that was rapidly approaching. There was just not the social basis for such a start in the America gloating 1990s. About 1995 he decided that he would, at age 70, “retire.” Retire to him meaning that he would do what he could, would “free-lance,” would get involved in campaigns as they came along (and as he knew they would). And that was where I found him working his ass off to get America out of Afghanistan at the time of the interviews. He finished the last one with this remark-he knew that he would not see that world socialist order that he had dreamed about since childhood but he hoped that there would be young people ready to fight for new Octobers, new Russian revolutions, that they would have enough sense of history to honor those who had fought for and defended that first “failed” revolution, and learn from the mistakes.
