Reward

Last week, as it had to many another of his colleagues, the fate worse than death befell burly, oldtime Communist William F. Dunne. He was expelled from the Party.

This was a continuation of the little purge, carried on while Mother Russia staged a big purge (TIME, Sept. 2). But within Communist circles it was far bigger news than the recent excommunication of Ruth (My Sister Eileen) McKenney et al. Tough, wide-chested, hard-drinking Bill Dunne, the "Wild Bull from Montana," had come into the Party by way of the I.W.W. He had led striking copper miners in Butte, textile workers in Passaic, coal miners in West Virginia. During the '20s he had plotted with William Z. Foster and Earl Browder to dominate U.S. Communists. In nearly three decades in the class war, he had braved the cops, employer goons and deputies of a dozen states; had danced and quaffed champagne with beautiful Russian women in Stalin's Moscow.

None of this was mentioned, however, when the Daily Worker made public the fact of his expulsion by the state board of the New York Communist Party. The Worker detailed his sins. Most mortal: fighting the Party's present "political and tactical line." Then, as usual in such cases, came a little character assassination: "In 1934, because of personal conduct unbecoming a member of our Party . . . he was removed from leadership. His degeneracy has proceeded so far that he could not be saved. . . ."

All this, of course, was done with the best of motives. As Outcast Dunne wandered through the cold capitalist world in his declining years, he would serve as a horrible example to countless potential deviationists, Trotskyites, Browderites, sectarians, bourgeois reformists, diversionists, factionalist-saboteurs and others contemplating sin. Thus he would, in effect, continue to serve the Party.

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