Unity from a Can of Worms

In front of a dingy social hall on Manhattan's Lower East Side last week, police cars prowled and reporters fretted. Inside, after some 60 other New York halls and hotels had refused them talking room, the top leadership of the U.S. Communist party--its "surface" membership down to about 8,500 from 80,000 in 1944--was holding its first national convention since 1950. Prime purpose of the four-day, closed-door session: to select a new national committee and to heal the three-way split in party ranks that had followed Moscow's "downgrading" of Stalin, its "upgrading" of Stalin, and the brutal intervention in Hungary.

The split among the 298 unelected "delegates"--at least 50 of them past or present defendants under the Smith Act--was wide. An insurgent group, headed by Daily Worker Editor John G. Gates, had savagely criticized Soviet conduct in Hungary, loudly proclaimed its desire to change the U.S. party into a "political action or education association"--a course by which, argued Editor Gates, U.S. Communism could win "independence" from Moscow, thus permit it to end its "isolation" from other U.S. "mass movements."

Hard set against this course were the old-line Stalinists headed by outgoing Party Chairman William Z. Foster, whom the dead dictator handpicked for his job in 1929. Rumbled old (75), ailing (heart disease) Chairman Foster, who had powerful Soviet and French Communist support: the Gates proposals would strip Marx-Leninism of its "international character," and reduce it to "innumerable national interpretations," an "impossible position for a Communist Party." Swinging wildly between the poles of "independence" and "solidarity" were the followers of Eugene Dennis, outgoing party secretary.

From this can of worms the comrades strung together a set of agreements preserving, at least for the time, the facade of party unity. By "overwhelming majorities," the U.S. Communists:

P: Voted to continue as a political party, but also, within limits, to allow themselves "to interpret" Moscow's edicts in accordance with U.S. conditions. The limits: such interpretation must be grounded on the premise that "the fundamental conflict is between the forces of the people and the forces of imperialism."

P: Elected, in a move to postpone a final showdown, 20 leaders from all major factions to the new national committee, including Foster, Gates and Dennis.

P: Agreed, in an attempt to end their "isolation," to try to build a "labor-peoples' antimonopoly" front with the help of the "reformist" groups which they had for many years fought, i.e., liberal labor leaders, independent Negro associations. Moreover, to get the new program under way, they decided to return party headquarters from effete Manhattan to Chicago, whence it had migrated in 1926. Reason: Chicago is near the heart of the farm belt and has a large concentration of Negro workers " in key unions."

From the unsolicited recipients of this largesse came howls of dismay. Cried Chicago's Mayor Richard J. Daley: "We don't want them here. Why don't they go to Moscow?" His feelings were echoed by Ralph Helstein, president of the United Packinghouse Workers, whose 120,000 membership is more than one-third Negro: "The Communist Party is about to go out of business. There's no place for it in Chicago or any other place in America." And from Manhattan's Dave Dubinsky, who had been individually applauded by the Communists in convention, came the hardest blow to their "labor-peoples' antimonopoly" project. Said the president of the International Ladies' Garment Workers in a comment that could be repeated by many another U.S. labor leader: "We have fought them since they first appeared on the American scene, and we shall continue to fight them."

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