National Affairs: No Dies

Last week the Communist Party gave a remarkable exhibition of hauteur. Like the aristocratic Southern lady who sneered “Newspaper talk” when told that the Titanic had gone down, Party members have steadily sniffed when evidence offered at Washington charged Communists with espionage, treason, counterfeiting, slugging, murder, double-dealing, graft, wrecking, sabotage, forgery, as well as considerable mental and political confusion. Beaming over recent Russian successes in Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland, Communists were in no mood to talk about the revelations of Congressman Martin Dies’s Committee investigating un-American activities.

What made the Communist nose-in-air the more remarkable was that it had been there so often before. Last April, when former Communist Agent Walter Krivitsky, onetime Chief of Military Intelligence in Western Europe, publicized Stalin’s undercover activities in the Saturday Evening Post, accurately forecast the Nazi-Communist Pact, Communists blandly asserted there was no such Krivitsky, featured a creepy New Masses article: “General Krivitsky, you are Shmelka Ginsberg!” At 10:30 one morning last week there appeared before the Committee a slight, thin-faced, intense man of 40 who was introduced by Chairman Dies as his most important witness to date. He was Walter Krivitsky.

Said he, he was born Samuel Ginsberg in the Polish Ukraine, took the name Krivitsky when he became a Communist in 1919. Lighting one cigaret from another, wincing as cameramen exploded flashlight bulbs, he unfolded in five hours of testimony an extraordinary story of the degeneration of a political party that, as he pictured it, had begun as an ardent movement for remaking the world and had turned into the instrument of an imperialist power. He said that Stalin dictated the policies of the U. S. Communist Party and that Russia financed it.

Carefully Witness Krivitsky explained that many Communists are not conscious Russian agents; many are considered too stupid or unreliable by Russians; many a warm-hearted Red battles vigorously for the final triumph of the toiling masses, unaware of cynical Russian manipulations behind the scenes.

Dies. What made Walter Krivitsky a valuable witness for Chairman Dies is that he fitted together for the first time the vast mass of unsavory evidence that the Dies Committee has gropingly assembled, gave it an intelligible pattern. Not the least extraordinary feature of last week’s hearings was its evidence of the education of the Dies Committee under the impact of its own findings. Beginning crudely 16 months ago, floundering around futilely at first with professional Red-baiters, crackpots and alarmists, it was nevertheless beginning to loom last week as one of the big U. S. legislative inquiries.

Closest parallel is perhaps Senator John Scott’s inquiry in the Ku Klux Klan in 1871, which began as a straight political move, accepted rumors, facts, alarms, nevertheless succeeded despite its flounderings, or perhaps because of them, in startling the victorious North with a picture of the desperate state of mind of the defeated South. Few correspondents would give Chairman Dies credit for statesmanship. Many held him only a showman. Some considered him a dangerous demagogue; some gave credit for the Committee’s more effective work to Investigator J. B. Matthews and Attorney Rhea Whitley. But the Committee’s cumulative findings suggested that Chairman Dies’s perpetually scandalized method of listening to everybody, hauling in back-fence radical gossip, old shoes, scandals, guesses and wild charges, was perhaps the best method of building up the picture of the elusive world of U. S. Communism.

Agents. If all Chairman Dies’s evidence should turn out to be true, U. S. democracy is riddled from top to bottom with anti-democratic elements. If true only in part, it presents a situation at least as ugly as that ventilated by Senator La Follette’s expose of violations of civil liberties.

Said Witness Krivitsky: “Soviet military intelligence has approximately the same function as the same service of other countries. Its unique feature is that it can recruit members of the Communist parties in the countries in which it operates. The leaders of the Communist Party consider it their duty to aid Soviet military intelligence in its work.”

But because Russia’s intelligence service is interested in “the entire economic and political life of this country,” it does not concentrate only on military secrets: “. . . Its agents are planted in all institutions, governmental, industrial and otherwise.”

No limelight lover after 17 years underground, Witness Krivitsky was still able to smile sardonically for cameramen after five hours of testimony, called it the worst ordeal of his life.

Dirba. Two days later the Dies Committee heard a witness as outspoken and blunt as Witness Krivitsky was retiring. This was Maurice Malkin, 40-year-old naturalized Russian fur worker, charter member of the U. S. Communist Party, long a well-known figure in the allegedly Communist-dominated Fur Workers Union in Manhattan. Tossed into jail for two years after the incredible New York fur workers’ strike of 1926,* Comrade Malkin nursed a grievance. But he remained a member until 1936, collected information, gossip, made statements that led Chairman Dies to observe: “It would be hard for the Chair to believe, if it were not for other information he has of the same kind.”

Malkin charges:

> That a fur workers’ union borrowed $1,750,000 from the late Gambler Arnold Rothstein, hired “Legs” Diamond to do its dirty work.

> That New York police had been bribed, including the famed head of New York’s Industrial Squad, Detective Johnny Broderick.

> That Communist agents operated in the Brooklyn Navy Yard.

Comrade Malkin named nine OGPU agents—including Julia Stewart Poyntz, who left the Party in 1936, mysteriously disappeared after threatening to write a book exposing it; named 24 labor unions, including the Newspaper Guild, as led or dominated by Communists.

While New York Police Commissioner Valentine sent a special detective to investigate the charge against Detective Broderick, and Navy Yard officials announced calmly that they knew they had Communists among their 9,300 workmen, but watched them carefully, main interest in the Communist Party centred on Comrade Malkin’s denunciation of Comrade Charles Dirba.

All old-line Party members well know Charles Dirba, a blue-eyed, stoop-shouldered, middle-aged Lett, conscientious, able, hard-working who for years has run the Communist Control Commission that passes on expulsions from the Party. When one comrade wishes to denounce another comrade, he writes out his charges, sends them to Comrade Dirba. Comrades may denounce each other as police spies, wreckers, Trotskyites, Lovestoneites, grafters, stool pigeons, for spreading stories about the central committee, for social fascism, for individualism, for anti-Party tendencies, for rotten liberalism, rotten intellectualism, conciliationism, for having personal relations with Trotskyites, for white chauvinism, for Zionism, irresponsible Bohemianism—for innumerable heresies whose very names sound weird in a democracy, but which operate to insure unquestioned obedience from members. These dread papers are pondered by Comrade Dirba in his office on the ninth floor of Party headquarters on 13th Street, Manhattan. His practice is generally to telephone the accused, usually around midnight, and say in a hollow voice, “Comrade, I would like to see you. . . .”

From quibbling about Krivitsky, Communists blandly went on last week to deny the existence of Dirba. These remarkable denials of reality reached a new high—in Washington a man brought suit against the Dies Committee, charging that the Dies Committee itself did not exist.* No Dies, no Dirba, no Krivitsky, no trade unions, no influence, no importance, no history, no Marx, no Lenin, no Stalin—to many an observer it seemed that the Communist Party was just about ready to declare that there was no Communist Party either.

Civil Liberties. Liberals fearing that exposures of Communist machinations might lead to a curbing of U. S. civil liberties assembled last week in Manhattan to ponder questions of censorship, trade unions, rights of foreign-born citizens. Doubters who lacked confidence in U. S. democratic institutions feared that action taken against Communists might extend to other minority groups. People who doubted the vitality of U. S. trade unions feared that the Dies expose might harm, rather than help, the U. S. labor movement. To these Attorney General Frank Murphy spoke soothingly, promised that civil liberties would be preserved while subversive, disloyal and treasonable activities were stamped out.

*An investigating committee discovered that $838,203.55 was spent by Communist strike leaders, only $194,754.09 accounted for; that after nine weeks the strike was settled for no better terms than employers had originally offered.

*One Fraser Gardner, indicted for perjury, filed a demurrer in Federal Court, claiming that because the Committee was nonexistent, he could not have committed perjury before it. Said Gardner: the Speaker forgot to reappoint the committee, although the House voted that it continue and gave it another $100,000.