Los Angeles, 1957–1960

LOS ANGELES TYPOGRAPHICAL UNION

I started attending the monthly meetings of the LA Typographical Union with Charlie Curtiss to learn about my new union first hand. At the time the ITU had two political parties, the Progressives and the Independents which would contend for office on both international and local levels. In sort of an anomaly, composing room foremen were members of the Union and paid dues but couldn’t vote in union elections as long as they held a foreman’s job. The “Progs” were slightly to the left of the “Indies” although there was not a huge amount of difference. One party served as a watchdog of the other and elections were competitive which helped establish a system of union democracy. The Independents controlled Local #174 at the time, while Progressives controlled elective executive offices of the International. Local Union meetings were once a month on Sundays so each political party would have a club breakfast meeting on that Sunday morning before a Local meeting which started at 1 pm. Charlie was an active member of the “Progs” and gave them his distinctive socialist presence. He published a small pamphlet from time to time on Union issues he called “Points for Progress” which was well received by rank and file members. So I became a regular at these breakfasts. Independent Joe Aubuchon was Local 174 President, while a veteran union officer Elmer Brown was the Progressive International president. The union meetings weren’t all that exciting as most business was quite routine. Free speech and civility prevailed at the meetings, quite a difference from the more autocratic environment of Chicago Local 16 Steelworkers Union. Elmer Brown came from ITU headquarters then in Indianapolis to one of our meetings. He matched the loquaciousness of a Dixie senator with his Southern accent where he would make his points in ten words where one would have sufficed. Since I worked in a non-union shop I never took the floor at a Los Angeles union meeting.

CLASSES ON SOCIALISM

Our SP Local held classes on socialism for our members and contacts, often led by Charlie Curtiss with his Marxist analysis. Actually some of our texts were the same as the ones used in CP classes: Communist Manifesto; Value, Price and Profit; Wage, Labor and Capital; Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, by Engels. Also Edward Bellamy’s pamphlet, Parable of a Water Tank. Instead of Leninist classics, we read a British Labor Party pamphlet written by someone named Henderson used in classes on democratic socialism in Britain. I led some of the classes with extra reading by G.D.H. Cole and other Britons where I emphasized the dangers of bureaucracy that Robert Michels had stressed. Democratic Socialists are no slouches on theory.

“SOCIALIST REGROUPMENT”

In the latter 1950s. an effort developed to bring together elements of the various left wing sects existing in the United States, which I believe was endorsed by iconic notables like the respected pacifist, labor and civil rights personality Rev. A.J. (Abraham Johannes) Muste (1885–1967), a leader of the Christian pacifist Fellowship of Reconciliation. The majority of the SP national leadership was cool to the idea as an impossible waste of time. However, our left wing including Third Campers thought this kind of dialogue could be useful as developing something in the way of left unity. Readers may be aware that AJ Muste was well known for leading the Lawrence Textile Strike of 1919 to a tangibly successful conclusion, founded the short-lived American Workers Party in 1934, played a major role in advising the Autolite Sit-down strike in Toledo, Ohio, and the following year had a brief flirtation with Trotskyism , which preceded his return to radical religious pacifism after visiting Trotsky in his Norwegian exile. I have previously written of my cousin Lempi/Jane’s involvement as a Musteite organizer in the Toledo strike, prior to her long involvement with Trotskyism. In recent research I found that Lempi under her political name “Jane Ogden” in 1935 had been business manager of a short-lived mimeoed publication “Young Spartacus” at age 24.

Our friends in the ISL saw merit in forums to bring about participating groups toward “regroupment,” except that its leading “guru” Max Shachtman thought the CP should be excluded because of its reprehensible Stalin worship. I don’t know how many of these forums took place around the country, but we showcased one in Los Angeles sponsored by the Locals of the SP, ISL, and SWP. We engaged the assembly hall of the First Unitarian Church of the progressive minister Stephen Fritchman. Shachtman came all the way from New York to speak for the ISL. An old revolutionary warhorse Arne Swabeck (1890–1986) spoke for the SWP, and I represented our own Local LA. I had scant experience in these circles compared to these two old ideologues, as well as in public speaking. So I wrote my opening statement to read verbatim. All three organizations brought a full force turnout. The SWP contingent was most colorful as its fifty supporters wore red tee-shirts and sat as a bloc toward the front. And the hall was packed.

Swabeck, whose political career had practically covered all the bases of the American Left: SP, IWW, CP and SWP, delivered a pedantic rundown of the SWP party line. As far as I can remember in my paper I tried to say that undoubtedly all of us spoke about our convictions with integrity and steered away from any hint of demonization. That while organic merger seemed unlikely, we could work together im areas of common agreement on issues. I sat down to polite applause and no one criticized or commented on my remarks. The real fireworks was between the two Trotskyist ex-comrades now political opponents.. Swabeck did the best he could with the SWP’s line of the USSR as a “degenerated workers’ state,” but the colorful Shachtman stole the show through oratorical demagoguery, humor and sarcasm. He had the audience practically rolling on the floor with laughter throughout except for the grim-faced Red Shirts of the SWP bloc. Of all debaters I’ve heard, the most colorful I’ve heard next to him was the late atheist ex-Briton Christopher Hitchens, a former Trotskyist turned neo-con who debated a UC Berkeley professor over the US invasion of Iraq. Hitchens’ sarcasm was over the top, as he’d be cutting into the poor prof’s remarks to belittle him, which Shachtman did not do. While he ran rings sardonically around his opponent, Shachtman did not demean Swabeck’s dignity by cutting into his remarks while the latter was speaking. While Shachtman was giving the audience a masterful display of theatre, Swabeck bent over to me and whispered: “That Shachtman is something else again,” obviously impressed by his ideological rival’s oratorical skills.

 MAX OUT TO WOO US ON SP-ISL MERGER

But the real reason for Shachtman’s visit to LA was not the Regroupment debate, but to woo the LA Local to build support toward an SP-ISL merger as many of us in LA were in doubt about such a prospect. His wife Yetta, who was secretary to New York American Federation of Teachers Union president, Albert Shanker, an establishment social democrat, had accompanied him to LA. . So they proposed dinner meetings with three de facto leaders of Local LA, Bill Briggs, Charlie Curtiss and me. They had dinner with each of us separately. The restaurant dinner which I had with the Shachtmans was amicable and courteous. Although they were undoubtedly aware of my positions on Leninist vanguardism, the subject was never raised, as their purpose was an overall softening up: “Look we’re not bad guys.” I mentioned my cousin Lempi whom they recalled well as Jane Ogden. They knew and respected her smarts and her organizational talents, although she had remained with the WP/ISL’s rival SWP. They also recalled Lyman and Freddy Paine well who were now part of the Correspondence publishing group as I told them about my social friendship with them in LA. They considered them somewhat cultish in their workerist worship. As I was a believer in worker democracy though not vanguardism, we all agreed that for workers to become socialists, a socialist party had an educational role in sharing the principles of democratic socialism with our class. Charlie of course, welcomed the idea of merger with his ex-comrades. The Briggses again shared my doubts as they recalled first hand the “French Turn” entryism of the Trotskyists in 1936 to woo our revolutionary youth, wreaking serious havoc on the SP in the process. (The idea of the “regroupment” of left sects soon died aborning.)

FULL-COURT PRESS

From then on it was a full-court press by the ISL majority to bring about merger which a number of our members favored nationally. Dave McReynolds, now living in New York working for the WRL, was an enthusiastic advocate and cooperated with the ISL to bring it about. Until recently comrades like Norman Thomas and Sam Friedman had been hostile to the ISL not considering them fully committed to democracy. Being the wily maneuverer that he was Shachtman must have had intimate meetings with comrades like Thomas and Friedman to convince them that the ISLers weren’t interested in taking us over and would join in the democratic give and take of normal socialist organization. The ISL did have a revolutionary minority which believed in the idea of proletarian revolution according to Leninist ideology, but Shachtman probably assured them they could be contained as well as left dissidents in SP ranks with the SDF unity now in the bank to insure a “responsible” majority control. It wasn’t too long that Thomas and Friedman dropped their opposition to a merger. Of course, some of us believed that Shachtman’s aim was to get cozy with the American labor bureaucracy with the SP a respected political vehicle to expedite that.

SP OPPOSITION TO MERGER

But there was still considerable opposition to merger within the SP, in New York with former National Secretary Robin Meyers as a leader, in Cleveland led by Ben Parker although a respected member of Cleveland’s left wing Max Wohl probably supported merger. Our own second largest SP Local in Los Angeles split in half over the issue. Some older LA SPers remembered the impact of the 1936 merger with the Trotskyists with resulting mayhem of stolen typewriters, mimeograph machines and other California Party property as well as huge unpaid phone bills they rang up in factional organizing as the SP expelled them nationally as “wreckers.” the following year. They were fearful of a repeat performance. So we came up with a local referendum vote to resolve our position as a Party local. Charles Curtiss led the pro-merger forces in the voting while Bill Briggs and I campaigned for a No vote, not trusting the final motives of the ISL. Whereas we didn’t think they wanted unity just for a split to steal some of our members, we did have apprehension of an eventual takeover of the SP through their disciplined cadre on a course of what we were unsure. In a way time proved us essentially right in the matter. Both sides of the referendum sent out mailings and made phone calls and house visits. I had recently recruited a Teamster James Kinney and his wife to the SP. The Kinneys were from Michigan, and Jim drove long distance trailer truck transports hauling new cars to different destinations in the Western States. At the point they joined they had three young children. Jim was a perceptive comrade with a good grasp of labor history. Charlie paid a visit to the Kinneys to urge their vote for the merger. But after considering both sets of arguments, Jim decided that our democracy would be best served by voting “no.” While there was some bitterness and acrimony within our ranks over the issue, the basic solidarity of our Local stayed intact. The NO vote prevailed in the end by a small handful of votes.

But that did not stop the campaign for merger, but intensified. as the ISL through its various branches kept up their campaign with some effective organizing within our ranks. . The whole matter was to be argued and voted at the 1958 SP National Convention in Detroit. Bill and I began to feel that despite our resistance our opposition seemed like a lost cause.

 CUBAN REVOLUTION 1953– ’59

A guerilla war waged by revolutionary forces led by the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, Huber Matos, and others was succeeding against the right-wing dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba which had been armed by the US capitalist empire and supported by our sugar and other commercial interests that pretty much owned the island, as well as syndicated American crime that operated the casinos, night life and prostitution in Havana. Enormously popular among the Cuban people and in the United States, the revolution prevailed as the Castro forces swept triumphantly into Havana in the opening days of 1959, as Batista and his wealthy cohort and henchmen fled the country.

Interestingly, while Fidel Castro was waging war from his mountain redoubts, the Moscow-run Cuban Communist Party had called him an “adventurer.” Batista had rewarded the CP with control of Havana’s waterfront unions to maintain “discipline” among its restive workers among whom Cuban anarchists had been strong. Meantime, the Stalinists made no challenges to Batista’s corrupt rule, a sweetheart deal for both cliques.

Castro made a triumphant tour of the United States where he pledged his full support for human rights and democracy, proclaiming the Cuban revolution was in the “spirit of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln.” as I heard him say on television. Fidel emerged as the revolution’s prime leader and made important reforms that were of benefit to the Cuban people. But the new government showed no mercy for the Cuban military fascists who had murdered and tortured so many of the revolutionary forces and shot and imprisoned thousands of them. They also dispossessed the imperial sugar interests of their properties and chased the US crime elements and racketeers who controlled the fleshpots of Havana night life back to New York. President Eisenhower was concerned with the dispossession of large American capital in Cuba and became a sworn enemy of the New Cuba as it rapidly nationalized the huge sugar holdings without compensation. The Cuban CP switched to support the new rulers and mergers took place to form a new Communist Party of Cuba which became more and more dependent on the Soviet Union for military and economic support as the Cold War extended to a new front in the Caribbean. Meantime Huber Matos (1918–2014), who had been a friend of social democratic President Jose Figueres of Costa Rica and had become a military commander in Castro’s forces, grew disillusioned with Castro as having gone too far with the revolution which was adopting new authoritarian features leading to a one-party political dictatorship. The upshot here was that Matos and Castro became enemies with the former Cuban school teacher ending up in prison for 20 years as a traitor. Matos was finally released in 1979 and lived out his long life in US exile. The Revolution made many reforms of immense benefit to its people, in education and socialized medicine which has been first-rate, considering, although the effective economic blockade which still prevails by the Colossus of the North, makes it difficult for the Cuban people. No doubt Cuba is still a police state with no civil liberties or independent labor movement but hopefully some of the minor reforms begun by the Obama presidency with that of Raul Castro will be an opening for democratic results.

1958 SOCIALIST PARTY CONVENTION

It was fully expected that the issue of ISL’s entryism into the SP-SDF would be determined by the 1958 Convention of SP-SDF in Detroit. The tide seemed to be turning toward acceptance within our membership. although there was a wide spectrum of opposition as witnessed by the Local LA referendum. Irwin Suall had replaced Herman Singer as our National Secretary. Suall had briefly joined the Wobs as a merchant seaman as a youth but had gravitated into the New York SP. He was also the first American student accepted on a special stipend to Ruskin College, with a British Labor curriculum of studies at Oxford University to train young cadre for the BLP. (The second would be Bruce Aubry, a young Oakland, CA native who had joined the SP of LA in the latter 1950s who moved back to the Bay Area around 1960 to enroll at the University of California campus at Berkeley transferring his SP membership from LA to the Bay Area.)

Irwin Suall appeared more amenable and flexible for organic unity with ISL than did the more old school New Yorker Comrade Singer. A couple of months before the Detroit Convention he contacted me and YPSL National Chair Dale Drewes of Washington, DC, and asked us to proceed to Detroit a week before the confab to set up a press conference for Norman Thomas. We agreed.

We stayed at the beautiful home of leading Detroit SP members Walter and Frances Bergman who were school teachers and leading Teachers’ Union activists. We were put in contact with Donald Slaiman, then Secretary of the Jewish Labor Committee in Detroit, who would advise us on how to mainstream media contact work to set up the press conference for Comrade Thomas. Slaiman was an ISL member as the Shachtmanites had been embedded in the Auto Workers Union’s Reutherite caucus for years. He took us on a tour of the UAW headquarters at Solidarity House and introduced us to officials and staffers as young SP members. Some of these middle-aged union piecards had formerly been SPers themselves, including UAW Education Director Brendon Saxton as had been the Reuther Brothers themselves. We made the rounds of the Detroit’s media outlets, its daily newspapers and TV stations with our press releases announcing the Norman Thomas press conference at the convention hotel the day before proceedings would begin and inviting their presence at the event.

We were fortunate to be able to attend the final pre-convention meeting of host Local Detroit, SP-SDF, at the Bergman’s home on the eve of the convention. We met some interesting comrades like Frank Marquart, an auto worker who developed great rank and file educational programs at several Detroit UAW locals. He was a lifelong champion of union democracy, where the power emanated from the workers themselves rather than from union bureaucrats from top down. Frank became a good friend for many years up to his death in Albuquerque in the 1980s*.. Jerry Raymond was Detroit leader of a small independent industrial union founded by tool and die makers, the Mechanics Educational Society of America, which had syndicalist and socialist roots and operated in Detroit, Cleveland, Pontiac and Flint. We also met Stan Ovshinsky, a brilliant young Detroit inventor and his wife Iris. (*Memoirs readers are encouraged to read Frank Marquart’s book, a labor classic, “An Auto Worker’s Journal: The UAW from Crusade to a One-Party Union,” University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.) (Stanford Ovshinsky (1922–2012) Self taught, with no college background, he was an eclectic inventive genius in many technical fields whose accomplishments are cited in Wikipedia.)

The press interview with Norman Thomas went off without a hitch, as the veteran Socialist was as eloquent and informative as ever in discussing current events and in his criticism of the capitalist system. I believe Dale Drewes and I did a professional job in organizing the media conference, with the help of Don Slaiman and other savvy PR advisers.

The convention itself was well attended because of the impending unity issue with delegates and visitors, particularly with ISLers who were for merger. A bloc of SP delegate merger opponents sat toward the front of the hall, led by former NatSec Robin Myers and Cleveland’s Ben Parker (Incidentally, Parker’s son Mike was part of the ISL youth.) Los Angeles delegates were Bill Briggs, myself and Charlie Curtiss, an active merger supporter. About a couple of dozen ISL members sat with their leader Shachtman toward the back of the hall. All during the debate SP pro-merger delegates kept running to the back of the hall talking strategy with the “Master Planner.” Seeing this, Bill and I decided that resistance was lost so neither of us spoke on the issue during the convention. The anti-group had great hopes of me being a leading opponent on the meeting floor, on the basis of our earlier successful LA referendum, and on an article I had written a couple of months earlier for the SP’s internal discussion bulletin “Hammer & Tongs,” critical of the ISL’s Leninism. But was disappointed when I told them that the game was over and Bill and I were out of it. Staunch old Mensheviks like Norman Thomas, Sam Friedman, and Darlington Hoopes were silent during the whole debate seeing that unity was a done deal. Shachtman had obviously sweet-talked them that there would be no “French Turn.” Charlie introduced me to Comrade Albert Goldman of Chicago, the old Trotskyist attorney who had joined the SP years back as well as Maurice Spector, an early Canadian Trotskyist leader (1898–1968) who both sought my support for merger. I was non-committal but they saw I wouldn’t oppose it.

SPECTOR UPSET WITH SHACHTMAN

(In a curious aside, David McReynolds told me some years later that in a huddle of merger supporters during or after the convention, Shachtman was concerned about the extent of SP opposition on the floor and said maybe they should back off on further merger talks until such time as the opponents could be persuaded into acceptance. The immediate reaction from SP pro-merger people was that further delay was unacceptable after this long campaign to bring it about and there should be no delay and the action should be voted through. Spector was upset about Shachtman’s backtracking. He had known Max for many years better than any of us, that this portended a sign of dubious and disastrous directions where his old comrade would try to lead us, and dropped out of politics after the convention and devoted the remainder of his life to Judaism.)

CONTINUE NEXT COLUMN

Meantime, on the convention floor, the Myers-Parker Opposition circulated a petition to put the merger issue on a referendum ballot to be voted on by the general membership of the SP no matter what the convention recommended. I didn’t sign the petition, that it would just prolong the agony as there were so many of our members, particularly the young, who were enthusiastic for unity. I understand that before the convention, Bogdan Denitch travelled to Chicago to urge the old libertarian socialists Virgil J. Vogel and Burt Rosen and their comrades to rejoin the SP and support merger with the ISL. Which they did. My feeling now was that we would lose a good many of the young people who had joined the SP in anticipation of building a larger, more vital movement, due to such a referendum.

ISL DISSOLVES, JOIN SP-SDF AS INDIVIDUALS

The Independent Socialist League took care of these problems by dissolving as an organization, just as had the earlier Trotskyist organization in 1936 but this time there was no French Turn. The ISL’s left wing led by Hal and Anne Draper went along with their own party discipline as Leninists, although less enthusiastic about the SP-SDF than Shachtman. But good numbers of latter-day Oehlerites who thought the merger was a betrayal of revolutionary socialist principles did not join. This included former Chicago University campus activist Scott Arden who I recall from 1952 who wrote a bitter article in their internal discussion bulletin denouncing the action as becoming immersed in a reformist social democratic swamp that only spelled total bankruptcy. Another opposition tendency led by Jim Roberston broke ranks to help found the Spartacist League, which went through several stages in its development but now exists as a strident doctrinaire Trotskyist group known for its sectarianism favored by few on the left. They publish a heavy-handed newspaper called Workers Vanguard, which some detractors call Workers Vampire. Most of its adherents I’ve met seem hostile, angry and difficult to deal with except on their own terms. Their most positive accomplishment is their Partisan Defense League which has long supported Mumia Abu Jamal, a black radical journalist serving a life sentence for the alleged murder of a Philadelphia cop which he and a number of credible witnesses have denied. For years he was under a death sentence for it, which the courts finally substituted “life without possibility of parole.”

ORGANIZATIONAL HONEYMOON IN SP

Everything was sweetness and light for an initial honeymoon period following the immersion of ISL members into the SP-SDF, before the eventual factionalism began to appear. Many new members joined, anticipating a period of continued growth for the Party in these new circumstances. A significant addition to our ranks was the noted German-Jewish sociologist, psychoanalyst, socialist-humanist author Erich Fromm (1890–1980) who now lived in Mexico City, and who brought his unique brand of Marxist Humanism into the mix. In an early election he was added to our National Committee. The members of the breakaway Young Socialist League enthusiastically returned to the fold, including Mike Harrington. Bogdan Denitch, Bill Shirley and others. In Los Angeles, I remained Chair of our merged Local for some months, eventually replaced by Art Kunkin, who also became editor of our Socialist Newsletter. I had decided to become more involved in my studies toward teacher’s credentials at LA State though I remained active in the Local. Within a few months after the merger, Irwin Suall who continued as NatSec and Max Shachtman came to visit our local, where we held a big meeting for them at a Workmen’s Circle Hall in Boyle Heights. A picnic was held at which we played a pick-up gender-inclusive softball game where 34-year-old out-of-shape Irwin Suall finished with sore limbs.

After the ISL dissolved and its paper Labor Action folded, Hal and Ann Draper moved from NY to Berkeley as did Bogdan Denitch whose home at Telegraph and Dwight Way near the University became an unofficial East Bay SP headquarters for a number of years. Hal Draper (1914–1990) enrolled in the Masters Degree program in Library Science at UC Berkeley and eventually became a UC campus librarian and continued his Marxist theoretical writing. Ann Draper (1917–1973) went to work for the Cap and Millinery Workers Union as union label director in San Francisco before being hired for the same job with the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. It’s interesting to note that the more radical left former ISLers like the Drapers, who were frequent visitors to LA, identified with us old SP Third-Campers, as Shachtman and his current began its drift toward the right in party politics. So a Briggs-Draper amalgam began to gel. An old SP Teamster militant Merle P. Bigenho became the first chair of the revived East Bay Local where the majority of activists were former ISLers, including Stan Weir who had moved north from LA. Stan and Merle got along famously. Don and Jean Thomas’s home on Guerrero Street in San Francisco became the central meeting place of the San Francisco Local, and Hank Braun and former UAW activist Bruce Sloan from its historic early Flint sit-down strike days made a stab at forming a Local in Marin County where Bruce was a free-lance landscape architect.

NORMAN THOMAS 75th BIRTHDAY DINNER

One of the first celebrations that Local Los Angeles sponsored after the unification cycle had been completed, and before factional divisiveness began to set in again in which all joined hands, was a 75th birthday dinner meeting in 1959 for America’s most celebrated living Democratic Socialist Norman Thomas which was also a party fundraiser. An address by Comrade Thomas himself would be the feature of the evening. The City of Los Angeles issued a proclamation in recognition of the occasion. Peace activist and famous scientist Linus Pauling of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena was one of a number of guests who made some remarks. The hall where the catered dinner was held drew several hundred people, including from organized labor, Jewish social democratic labor groups (many of whose members worked in the still thriving Los Angeles garment industry), civil rights and civil liberties activists and the antiwar movement. I treated my mother to the dinner and we were joined by another older Finnish-American couple who were veterans of the old Finnish Federation of the SP who had met both Norman and his wife Violet during its heyday. Thomas was in rare form as he devoted his speech primarily to the dangers of a rapidly growing garrison state in the United States as a threat to world peace, still under the cloud of an international nuclear umbrella which feeds the fears of the earth’s people of a war which would destroy all of civilization. That fear is stronger than ever today where the remaining superpower, our own USA, has a vast military arsenal many times larger than that of the rest of the world combined with nearly a thousand bases girding the earth, according to the late UC Berkeley and UC San Diego professor, Chalmers Johnson.

REALIGNMENT POLITICS

Quite soon after merger Shachtman and his younger now disciple Michael Harrington and other followers made known their advocacy of a politics of realignment whereby the SP would no longer be an electoral political party but would operate as a current within the Democratic Party and in the trade union movement in opposition to the corrupt big city machines and Southern racist Dixiecrats, to establish the Democrats as a social democratic party through a “radicalism of the possible.” This new line appealed to those traditional non-Leninists of the SP who already sympathized with the idea of working within the Democratic Party to change it. But it drew the wrath of many independent electoralists within our ranks who believed in the “ginger factor” of running socialist candidates to drive US politics to the left or by organizing an independent American labor party against the twin parties of capitalism, the Democrats and Republicans. It also brought about the irredeemable enmity of the Draper faction against its ex-Shachtmanite comrades who in terms of electoral politics looked toward the formation of an independent labor party. Old SP electoral actionists like Bill Briggs wanted no part of Realignment nor did many other members of our old LA Local. A number of us saw the Dem Party as an integral part of the capitalist system with all its ties to corporate influences and were critical of the business union bureaucrats’ lockstep ties with it, with people like George Meany being a leader of its pro-war militaristic wing. We’d seen so many idealistic liberals and ex-socialists get involved with it with the intention of reforming it leftward only to be caught up with its pro-capitalist corruption and become part of its establishment. Like being piano players in a whorehouse or operating its towel service.

I didn’t look forward to the SP running any more Presidential campaigns with the 2000-vote debacle of the Hoopes-Friedman campaign of 1956, but thought it worthwhile to post candidates in local, even statewide campaigns, for their educational value, and even get elect independently in local elections, where it was possible such as in Wisconsin from time to time. Even more recently socialists have been elected mayors in cities like Madison and Santa Cruz, CA. At this writing (11/14.15) Kshama Sawant, a socialist woman, won reelection for a second term on the Seattle City Council with 54% of the vote over a business Democrat who had financial backing from the national Chamber of Commerce. Sawant, an Indian immigrant and an economics professor, had solid support from the Seattle trade union movement in this round.. I was willing to look at Harrington’s ideas on Realignment as his language was fresher than Shachtman’s with his dogmatic lingo of many decades. But as time went on it was evident that Max was more interested in consorting with the old SDF labor bureaucrats now in the SP than with those of us supportive of rebel rank and file efforts in labor for a more militant anti-capitalist unionism. Harrington again was more interested in the “social unionism” of the Reuthers with its own limitations rather than the conservative business unionism of the Meanys, Albert Shankers and Lane Kirklands. All these issues around Realignment and its variations and opposition pervaded SP politics for the next dozen years until the historic three-way organic split between these currents in 1972–’73.

1960 SP-SDF NATIONAL CONVENTION

Bill Briggs and I were elected to represent Local LA at the first post-merger convention in Washington, DC., my last as a delegate from this Local. All the principal leaders of the former SP, SDF and ISL were present. During a good part of the proceedings I sat with Prof. Mulford Q. Sibley, of the University of Minnesota, after a guest stint at Stanford, ever the Third Camper and pacifist. David McReynolds was a NY delegate and a staffer for the War Resisters League. In opening remarks, a rotund younger SDFer, a stockbroker in Washington, proffering the greetings of the host local, made an entertaining observation. Not remembering his name any more, he said with wit and great relish that contrary to earlier expectations the old SDF was now to the left of the former ISL on some questions. As I guffawed, my eyes happened to meet those of Max Shachtman for a moment and he glared angrily at me, not thinking the DC comrade’s remark was very funny. What had happened to Max’s own acerbic wit when he used to lower the boom on some hapless debate adversary?

The strangest delegation in my mind came from Boulder, Colorado led by Professor Alex Garber, a Los Angeles native and son of Jewish SP immigrant parents who had previously taught at UC Berkeley as a leading ISL member in the Bay Area. While at Colorado University. and after 1964 at Sacramento State, he had recruited some of the most right wing YPSLs I’d ever seen to that point. While all the other YPSLs from around the country took antiwar positions on foreign policy issues whether from an SP or YSL background, this Colorado bunch proposed the Party engage in building bomb shelters per a US government program. “Ban the Bomb” and universal disarmament was on the minds of many delegates while Garber and the Colorado youth were supporting a militaristic Cold War proposal of the US government. Their resolution was readily dismissed by the Convention but was a harbinger of a pronounced right wing development within the Realignment Caucus in the party, with Garber later becoming a supporter of the hawkish politics of the right-wing Democratic Senator Henry Jackson of Washington State. Elliott Abrams and Linda Chavez, who were once Boulder YPSLs, became rabid neo-conservative flacks for the Republican Party. Shachtman became part of that rightward thrust quite rapidly, catering to the leading Cold Warriors of the trade union movement like AFL’s George Meany and Lane Kirkland and their CIA fink Jay Lovestone. Some years later Dave McReynolds recalled a debate he had with Shachtman over an antiwar resolution he had presented to the Convention which prevailed in the vote. That defeat had miffed the old ISL ideologue so much that he returned to his hotel room in a huff, and was not seen on the convention floor for the rest of the weekend. Shades of things to come?

POST-CONVENTION TRIP TO NEW YORK.

Right after the convention I rode to New York in the car of Jack Cypin, an economics professor at a Long Island University, and a former Lovestoneite who had remained in the SP and was a staunch part of its left wing. Other passengers were Bill Briggs and a two young left-wing comrades from New York. While in New York I connected with David Miller who I had known as a math instructor at Michigan State, now married and living near Washington Square in Greenwich Village. He gave me the number of my old CP comrade Jimmy Zarichny from State, also living in the Village, suggesting I give him a jingle. Which I did. We sat on a Washington Square park bench and chatted for a couple of hours. Jimmy was working to complete his BA at Columbia after his expulsion from State as a Communist and working part-time to support himself. I was delighted to hear him tell of his departure from the CP in 1956 after the shock of the Khrushchev Revelations at the 20th Congress of the CPSU (B). I told him of my experiences at the SP Convention in Washington. In New York he was working on protest activities over police mistreatment of a gay male interracial couple in the Village and took me to meet them at their apartment. Both were from Atlanta, a white man and his black lover and partner. I didn’t stay in touch with Jimmy after that meeting until he wrote to me years later after securing my address from Dave McReynolds which I’ve cited in an earlier Memoir installment. I don’t remember if I dropped by at my cousin Lempi’s place in Walden on that trip or just communicated by phone or letter. I told her of Max Shachtman’s sharp rightward turn at the Convention and his Democratic Party focus, which didn’t surprise her or Mickey. Then back to wrap things up in LA.

ARAB SOCIALIST STUDENTS, LA PEACE MARCH

Sometime during the latter 1950s, Bruce Aubrey who was living with a Socialist family in Pasadena, ran into some Iraqi students who were attending Cal Tech and were young members of the Iraqi Ba’ath Party, an organization connected with an emerging secular Arab socialism, founded in Syria in 1947. Mostly engineering students, Bruce brought them to several meetings of our Local Los Angeles. They were sincere, curious students who appeared in agreement with our US version of democratic socialism. After all, the Ba’ath Party had been founded on the principles of “Unity, Liberty, and Socialism.” We had some productive dialogue with them. Eventually they returned home and we heard no more of them. Bruce again went home to Oakland and enrolled at UC Berkeley as an undergraduate and became a part of the SP’s East Bay Local. I’ve often wondered what happened to those Iraqi Ba’athist students? Saddam Hussein took part in a military coup in Iraq in 1968 and became absolute dictator not longer afterward and the Ba’ath Party ended up as part of his ruthless political machine. It’s quite possible that these visiting students may have been shot in the turmoil.

LOS ANGELES PEACE MARCH

Some time during the summer of 1960 we participated in the first peace march I’d ever experienced, numbering about 20,000 people through the streets of LA.. We had a goodly contingent from the Los Angeles SP. I’ve forgotten its theme and could not google such an event, but since the nuclear age was still on the front burner of the public mind, it might have had to do with the Ban the Bomb theme. It was a peaceful demonstration although contingents of cops stood at a distance. There were some trucks with cameras filming it right along which may have been the work of the FBI recording such a “subversive” activity for its files.

1960 DEMOCRATIC PARTY CONVENTION

Nominating its Presidential slate for the 1960 elections was the primary purpose of the Democratic Party National Convention which was held from July 11–15, at the LA Memorial Sports Arena south of downtown. Leading candidates were Sen. John F. Kennedy of Massachusetts, Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson of Texas, Sen. Stuart Symington of Missouri, and UN Ambassador Adlai Stevenson who had been defeated by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. The Socialist Party in its current phase would not be running a candidate, but Local LA rented a trailer which was parked for the duration of the Convention across the square from the Arena. We used it as a center where we provided literature about our own program and calls for a strong civil rights and anti-Cold War foreign policy to be made available to the public around the convention hall. We served free coffee and doughnuts for all who dropped by. Mike Harrington who was committed to working within the Democratic Party and attended the convention itself to promote his Realignment politics, would stop by our trailer from time to time for a break and to chat.

Our biggest mission at the convention was to help organize a large demonstration outside the Arena to demand the proceedings inside to adopt a strong civil rights plank for racial integration and equality. So while the business of the convention was going on inside the Arena, about 2000 of us marched around the building with signs chanting for an end to racial discrimination and a program to end it for once and for all. It was a spirited demo which included large numbers from the black community, with others from the Latinos and Left. I was proud to be part of that procession. After our march, we filed into a gallery closed off and behind the main convention floor where we are addressed by civil rights figures as well as candidates or their representatives. The Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., spoke to us with his usual eloquence and passion and we enthusiastically cheered him more than any other speaker. It was the first time I’d ever seen the great civil right leader in person. Rep. Adam Clayton Powell, long-time black Congress member from Harlem gave a powerful rant that didn’t impress me much with its contrived angry demagoguery.

Adlai Stevenson was the first Presidential hopeful to appear and was loved by our mostly young audience that saw him as the hope of the left in the convention. Actually, he was more of a centrist himself but his eloquent command of the English language made him appear more progressive than he was. Certainly no Eugene Debs. To our surprise the leading candidate for the big prize, Sen. John Kennedy made a personal appearance to us back benchers. Considered to the right of Stevenson he turned on his youthful charm for us and managed a favorable response on our unofficial applause-o-meter. Oscar Chapman, Secretary of the Interior during the Truman Administration, came to speak for Lyndon Johnson, and was greeted with a lusty round of boos. Although a prairie populist of the broad Southern left, LBJ was seen as a slick, not-so-ethical Party power broker. His civil rights positions were suspect to his present audience.

Meantime on the convention floor, Senator Sam Erwin from North Carolina made a strenuous attempt to weaken the Party’s civil rights plank. He was primarily countered by Hawaii’s Patsy Mink whose eloquent speech in favor of a strong plank won by a two-thirds majority. So our demonstration outside of the Arena had not been in vain.

John F. Kennedy received the Presidential nomination on the third ballot. He had initially favored Stuart Symington for a running mate but settled for second placer in the top job sweepstakes Lyndon Johnson as VP hopeful to give the ticket a Southern balance. Symington was third in the presidential balloting and Stevenson as a two-time loser in 1952 and 1956 was left in the cold for fourth place. So in November it would be Kennedy-Johnson versus Vice President Richard M. Nixon and UN Ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge for the Republicans. Minor party candidates would be Eric Haas of the Socialist Labor Party and Farrell Dobbs of the Socialist Workers Party, and several vanity candidates from the right. So the Democratic Convention concluded my political life in Los Angeles. Shortly afterwards I quit my job at Times-Mirror Press, loaded my Plymouth with duds and books and with an ITU travelling card in hand I left to seek my fortune in San Francisco, leaving family and good comrades and friends behind from six and one-half productive years.

End of Installment 19