By 1950, with the assault on the CP widening nationwide, near panic gripped the Party. Offices closed down, and activity diminished or ceased altogether in some areas. In a series of meetings, which may have begun as early as 1947, Party leadership reached the uneasy conclusion that war between the United States and the Soviet Union was inevitable. The Party would soon be declared illegal, and severe repression would follow. To survive this long night of fascism, the Party needed an underground organization, as successful as those developed by the Italian and Japanese parties during World War Two. With dramatic urgency, this became known as the “five minutes to midnight” policy. Much to the anger of Chairman Foster, the California Party (known as the “Yugoslavia” of the CP for its persistent iconoclasm) openly disagreed, arguing that it was premature to expect fascism and that the policy was destructive. Time would prove California correct, for the consequences of the underground policy were a major factor in the ultimate dissolution of the Party.
In the meantime, the Party pared itself down to a skeletal force of dedicated cadre. This was accomplished by a loyalty-security purge that would have made the State Department proud. By 1949, the Party had stopped issuing membership cards and destroyed its central membership list. Now the core membership were required to fill out a questionnaire that searched for questionable areas of ideology and personal behavior. Homosexuals and those in psychotherapy were purged as potential security risks.1 This was followed by an ideological purge based on “white chauvinism.” The Party, which had from its inception been the most race-conscious of all national parties, expelled members for such extremes of political correctness as serving African-Americans tea in a chipped cup or watermelon for dessert. Early in July 1951, the Party purged all members who had not reregistered. Thousands of loyal though inactive members were expelled, considered unreliable because they had not reasserted their Party ties. From this skeletal crew, a dedicated cadre was selected to form the shadow leadership.
The underground to which they descended was organized into three levels. The first was known as the “deep freeze.” These were members of the top leadership who had either jumped bail on the first Smith Act conviction or not shown up for their trials. This also included several hundred men and women who were not under indictment at all, but were chosen because of their knowledge, experience, and the expectation that they might be indicted. The second level was the “deep, deep freeze.” These trusted members were viewed as a source of leadership in case all the other leaders had been arrested. Many were sent abroad to Canada, Mexico, and Europe and ordered to change their lives completely and not engage in any political activity. The last level was known as the “OBU”—operative but unavailable members who traveled about the country, often in disguise, as a liaison between the open Party and the leaders in the “deep freeze.”
The move underground was triggered by the 1951 Supreme Court decision upholding the conviction of the first Smith Act defendants. As this also signaled the Justice Department’s nationwide arrests of Communist leaders, the Communist plan appeared to have some justification. Aboveground, the CP went on much as before, with many of its spokesmen remaining at their posts. But who was in charge? With the Party command parceled out between the underground, the open Party, and prison, the reins of leadership were hopelessly tangled. Those in prison proffered advice through letters and family visits; those in the underground through couriers, pseudonymous articles in Party journals, and the rare meeting. The result was contradiction and chaos.
Life in the underground may not have been as chaotic, but it certainly was stressful. Even though the Party was not strictly illegal, nor was anyone engaged in sabotage or terrorism, and no arrest warrants had been issued (except for the aforementioned few), life in the shadow world took on the attributes of a B-movie thriller. The shadow Reds required false identities, forged papers, disguises, and safe houses, and they utilized a system of contacts based on such devices as a red rose or a copy of Life magazine.
Unfortunately, the FBI seemed to know all about it. Hoover sent out hundreds of his agents to play cat and mouse with the underground. As a countermeasure, the Party distributed lists that identified the cars used by federal agents by their license numbers. To throw off the agents, Communists ran yellow lights, pulled unexpected U-turns, and jumped on and off subways at the last moment. In many cases, the Communists were more than able to elude their pursuers, but the FBI had their successes as well, and occasionally revealed them to the Communists just to prove the point. As one cadre discovered when he sat down to a cup of coffee in a drugstore, only to be joined by a pair of agents who informed him, with corroborating details, that they had been following him for nearly five years.
The underground exacted a heavy political, financial, and personal toll. Several thousand men and women were separated from their families for as long as six years, in some cases. The rare visits husbands and wives did enjoy were managed in the most furtive ways. Many children knew only that Daddy was away on an “important mission.” Those who followed their parents into the underground grew up with false identities, isolated from family, friends, and familiar surroundings. Marriages dissolved under the pressure. Millions of dollars that might have gone to organizing were spent on lodging, transportation, and the complex system of couriers. The underground membership, so carefully chosen for their experience and dedication, found themselves torn from their accustomed routines, thrown into unfamiliar occupations. In many cases, the strains of loneliness provoked mental and physical breakdowns. With so many of the key members “unavailable,” political work and carefully nurtured contacts, representing years of effort, fell by the wayside. A political soul-searching ensued. Seasoned Communists realized the impossibility of carrying a political movement in this fashion. Profound doubts arose about the entire course of American Communism and chipped away at the most basic premises of the Party.
This degree of personal and political trauma goes far to explain why, with the upheaval of the 1956 crisis, nearly everyone who had been in the underground abandoned the Party within a year.
At the time of his arrest by the FBI in November 1954, Scales was the Party chairman of the Southern District and district organizer for North and South Carolina, Virginia, Tennessee, and northern Mississippi.
During the last two years before I was arrested, I was in the so-called underground. The FBI business, the general McCarthyist spirit, made it so difficult for us to work that our influence had been cut sharply. But much activity still kept up. We were still a potent electoral factor, and there were all kinds of local issues. The same channels were still there, but of course we lost a lot of the membership.
I couldn’t see my family more than once in two months, once in six weeks. Actually what it amounted to at first was just being unavailable, but later on I was pretty sure they were going to arrest me, so I tried to avoid them altogether. Which was very hard, because they had informants in the Party or near the Party that had a fair idea of where I was or where I would be. So what I did was just to radically change my way of living. I would not stay with Party people they knew, in the main. If I did I would do it very carefully. For instance, if I had to make a long bus trip, I would do it mostly by night. It would save room rent and I would have made careful prearrangements where only one person knew.
When I was finally arrested in Memphis, it was a young working-class couple that informed on me. They were good people, but they got to them some way. I think it might have been because they were having trouble with their mortgage, but they were the only two that knew I was coming to town. They were supposed to meet me at seven-thirty at a certain street corner, so the FBI broke their necks trying to intercept me before then, because that meant they’d give away two good informers, and they couldn’t do that. I showed up at the street corner forty-five minutes early. I knew the FBI was there.
By that time I had my wife located in New York. She had an apartment in the Bronx. So I came from New York to make this trip, which I had set up very carefully. I caught a ride with somebody that I knew to somewhere in Pennsylvania. From there, I got a bus to Cincinnati, stayed overnight. Then I took another bus that I caught on the street to Memphis. Memphis had trolley lines that ran out in all directions, and you can see the overhead wires. When I got about fifteen miles from city limits I saw those and got off the bus. Then I caught the first bus I could and then caught a second one. When it got into Overton Park in Memphis—where the zoo is, there’s a whole long area where you can’t get from one avenue to another because of the park—I got off at the zoo, and ran to the next avenue. I hopped the bus going the other way into the heart of downtown Memphis, got off at a big intersection, caught a cab ten blocks the opposite direction, went through a store that covered a whole block, came out of the back of the store and into a movie. I sat in the movie theater working on my notes and plans for the meetings I was to have.
I was going to be in Memphis for the next five days—I was going to meet very carefully with different individuals. When it got close to time, I got on another trolley and went out and got three blocks from the rendezvous spot. A guy in a brown suit gets on the bus and I knew perfectly well that I had a tail, that he was FBI. Brown suit and loose lips. He rode the bus three blocks, one block past the rendezvous. And I got off two blocks past the rendezvous, and I walked around. There was a heavy thunderstorm coming up. I could see FBI cars parked along the road. When I would go by, they would lie down on the seats, I could see them. They had something like seven or eight cars, all over the place.
I lived out of a fifteen-pound briefcase, I had a shirt that I could launder and drip-dry overnight, I had a set of underwear that were nylon so they would drip-dry overnight, and I had all kinds of papers and even some phony identities, because I changed my name at every major city I was in. I had a different name which I used consistently in each city. I walked along and reached into my briefcase and tore up a lot of this stuff, anything I thought would be useful to them. A heavy rainstorm came up, and I swooshed it down the street sewer. So then I was approaching the rendezvous, I had five minutes to go, and I walked slowly along like I was enjoying the rain. I got there to the second and then all these car doors opened and the FBI jumped out with pistols leveled. “We got you, Scales! End of the road!”
Hospitable, a good talker, Brown is a fireplug of a guy with labor battles reaching back to his teens. In ’28, he went on strike with Oakland’s newsboy union; in ’35, as a waterfront organizer, he was framed on murder charges and acquitted; he survived the Spanish Civil War and the Battle of the Bulge to join the Communist underground; arrested in ’61 under the Communist Control Act, his case was dismissed by the Supreme Court in ’64. We drink beer in his living room in San Francisco as grandchildren run through the house. At one point, he pulls out an old encyclopedia and turns to “Communism.” In a photograph, Attorney General Brownell stands before a diagram of the American Communist leadership. Amused, Brown points to his own portrait on the chart. (For more of Archie Brown’s story, see under “The Fight Against HUAC.”)
I was a trade union director for the California Party and a member of the Central Committee of the national Party from the time I came back from the war in ’46 through about the middle of ’51. When the verdict came down on the Communist Party leadership at Foley Square1 it was decided I would be one of those who would go underground. I was gone from the middle of ’51 to the middle of ’55, four years or so.
We were inexperienced, and we had to feel our way, so to speak. It was a learning process, and we made a lot of errors. But we did have a network, and got it tuned up so that we kept contact with our folks who were still active on the front. It was pretty fierce for them, because there was a blacklist going on against those who were working and those in the professions.
I never went outside the United States. I was here in Northern California most of the time, sometimes I went to Southern California. I got myself a Social Security card, a driver’s license, whatever I needed, but I actually never went to work. What I did is studying and then meet with people. You’d have to go through all kinds of maneuvers to do it.
You’d have somebody who’d come along with an automobile, and you’d ride with them for a while. In the whole Bay Area I know more places, beautiful views and dead-ends, you’d go to one dead-end and walk over the bridge to another car on the other side and then you’re gone in that car, you do it a couple of times if need be, and hopefully on their side they’re doing it too. So sometimes the meeting would happen, sometimes it wouldn’t.
I’d stay with people right here in San Francisco, or in Oakland. Nobody would ever see me except the people I was staying with, and people would come to the house. Either the person at the house or somebody would come with a car and pick me up and I’d go to meetings.
One time I went to New York. We had a whole house to ourselves. People who could show themselves to the neighbors, they did. The rest of us stayed in the house all the time. We were there for a week, to have our conferences and discussions.
What mainly brought the underground to an end was the California case of the thirteen, particularly the Oleta Yates appeal to the Supreme Court—that turned it around finally, so there was a question about the validity of the Smith Act. Our people were being released, the thirteen were being released. Things were changing, the atmosphere was changing.
About November 1955, I just showed up in the Bay Area. Nobody bothered me, so then I went down to Ontario, California, where my wife was staying with her family and made arrangements to come back to San Francisco. I came up by myself for a while, stayed with some friends, and went back to work on the waterfront. I had some problems there for a while, but the union, the ILWU, stuck by me.
The employers tried to use the fact that I had been away to keep me from going back to work, claimed that I had violated the contract. I lost my industry registration at the time—so did several other people for other reasons. Then the employers wanted to hire on some additional people. The union said, “If you want these additional people, you take these guys back first.” So that was agreed and that’s how I got back to work.
Living underground was hard, really a strain, particularly on my wife. The FBI chased her up and down this state while I was away, a really horrifying experience, and some really humorous experiences too. She really felt it, in many ways, more than I did. We always discussed when will it end, how to arrange things and so on. It was pretty fierce. But the get-togethers were good; oh, they were always good, we always had a lot of fun.
Archie Brown died at seventy-nine on November 23, 1990.
Wife to Archie, a plain-spoken, neighborly woman. “I always worked in a law office as a so-called legal secretary. Once when I went looking for a new job this guy asks me who I had worked for. I tell him. He says, ‘Well, you’ve worked for a lot of Red lawyers. Are you a Red?’ I said, ‘Well, I’m Redder than anything you ever saw.’ That was the answer. I worked for him for twenty years. A criminal lawyer. Not a Red, but a very decent guy.”
When Arch came home from the Army in ’46, he didn’t go back to work on the waterfront, he went to work full-time for the Party. In the summer of ’51, he went underground.
I took my four kids and my dog and we went to my dad’s farm in Ontario, near San Bernardino, where he grew roses. We came back in the fall to get the kids ready for school. When I started back, I’ll bet I wasn’t a mile off when I realized for the first time that I was being followed. Maybe it was in the back of my head, I don’t remember. But I remember all of a sudden, “Hey, there they are!” Well, they followed me all the way back to San Francisco.
We lived on Potrero Hill at that time, I guess it was late August. Whatever I did, I felt like a circus parade. I mean, there was always one car ahead of me and two behind. Or if I walked they would be circling the block. Not only could I see it, but I figured everybody else could. The other thing is that your friends don’t want to come around, because as soon as they come to visit then they’re followed. So it got to be really ugly.
There was a Safeway on 24th and Potrero, and Betsy was just an infant. She was four or five months when Archie was gone. So I would take her in the stroller on a one-way street where they couldn’t drive. They’d be at the corner waiting for me. I would go in the market and they would stand at the checkstand to watch me. I decided, hell, I can’t stand this, it’s too hard with just me and four little kids. I didn’t want to stay up here by myself.
Some of the neighbors were good, but there was one woman across the street who was constantly watching me. I felt she had been employed by the FBI. She was always looking out the window. The funny thing, I didn’t want to move back to that house when we came back. I never wanted to go back there and live.
Anyway, my dad said, “I’ll get Mayflower-Hickey”—the moving van in Ontario—“to go in there and move you out—and don’t worry about it.” So they came and packed the dishes and everything.
I had a Studebaker Champion with one of those baskets that hung over the front seat into the back, and I had these four kids. Doug must’ve been eleven then, Susie was eight, Stephanie was four, and then the baby. I couldn’t get anybody that would go with me, so I had to drive alone. I guess we had been going about an hour, maybe two hours, when Susie says, “Mommy, somebody’s following us.” Doug knew, of course, because he knew what was going on at home. I wasn’t in any position to make any explanation, because I had to drive.
So I drove and they followed from the time I left in the morning until I got about a mile from Ontario and they took off, so by the time I got to my dad’s they had disappeared. But they were there on the street the next day. The house was on the corner, and there would always be one car and then another car, and then another one. So whatever I did, one would follow me with two others behind. There were always three cars around the clock. Think of the taxpayers’ money! Twenty-four hours a day, three cars with two guys in each. It went on for six solid weeks.
Douglas learned to drive at that time. One day we’re driving and we got to a street that a lot of water ran down so it was kind of a wash. Doug stalled in the wash with the FBI car right behind him. He flooded it, as a kid will do. So I just sat there and let him figure out how to get out of it. And pretty soon the FBI guy came and wanted to know if he could help, and I said, “Hell no!” So that was that.
One of the other things that happened in that six weeks was that my brother-in-law suggested to my sister that we meet him in Nogales, Arizona, during the convention the Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers Union was having there. He was an organizer. So we decided to ditch these bastards and we would go. You know, the pressure of it is terrible! Every time you turn around—you don’t want to go anywhere.
I have a big family, so I had a lot of help. At night, we turned the lights out in the yard and I went walking through the fields, maybe a mile, to where my cousin picked me up and took me to their place in town. In the morning, my sister walked down from ten acres away where she lived and took my dad’s car. It already had my bag in it that we’d put in the night before in the dark so they couldn’t see it. She got in my dad’s car and she went for a drive to make sure that nobody was following her. She went uptown, she drove around, she did everything to make sure that nobody was following her. And when she was sure of that she went over to my cousin’s and picked me up and we headed for Nogales.
It was a hot, hot day, and I remember we stopped in Indio, somewhere out in the desert. We were sitting there having a Coke or something and she says to me, she says, “You know, the tightness on your face is just starting to loosen up.” So anyway, we went off to Arizona, “clean,” as they say, nobody followed us.
We were gonna be gone a week. My dad made arrangements for a friend of the family to come and stay with him and the kids. You know, he’s got rose fields way to hell and gone. Fifteen miles from home he’s driving out on a private road through the field, and this damned FBI guy is right behind him, so he really got mad. He stopped the car and got out and he went over. The guy pulls up a map real quick and starts looking like he’s lost. My dad says, “Hey, this is private property. You get the hell off!”
While we were in Nogales, Vincent Hallinan1 spoke at the convention, so my sister and I asked him, “Is there something we can do? Have they got a right to do this?” He says, “Look, they’re on public property, you can’t do anything. But you know, you ought to harass them. Call the police and tell them you’re afraid on account of your kids, get out there and take their picture, do everything you can to make their life miserable.” So we decided that was a hell of a good idea.
I flew home from Arizona without calling, sending a telegram, or anything, because I figured it’s just easier to do it that way. I got home on a Saturday. Sunday afternoon, the telephone rang and a voice says, “This is Western Union, I have a telegram for Mrs. Archie Brown. Is she there?” Now you know, in the country that’s what they do. They phone you up and they read you the wire, and then they put it in the mail. So as soon as he said, “I have a telegram for Mrs. Archie Brown,” I knew Arch would never send anything to Mrs. Archie Brown, I mean he wouldn’t—I’m not Mrs. Archie Brown; I’m Esther Brown or Hon Brown or whatever, but I’m not Mrs. Somebody Else.
So I said, “This is Mrs. Brown.” He read me some nonsense—“Wish you were here, love you very much.” I said, “Fine, thank you, would you put it in the mail?” He says, “Sure.” Of course, it never came. I knew it was a phony. They had missed me and they were trying to find out if I was back. And of course, then pretty soon they were there too, right back on the street. So we got out the camera and we started taking the pictures. That’s the first thing we did. And about the second day, they’re gone, no more. So I thought, “Wow, this is a great system! I wish we’d have done it in the first place.”
But then I found out: I had a friend whose husband was also underground and she was staying with relatives in a place called Perris, which is near Riverside, so we were kind of out in the same area and I used to visit with her. She had three kids, and we used to compare notes. She had the same problems. The FBI stopped following her at the exact same time. So then it wasn’t because we were harassing them, it was because they just pulled off, I guess. I don’t know if they figured that I was going to lead them somewhere or they were just harassing, I don’t know. Whatever it was they were doing, they stopped doing it.
Now my friend Ethel, this woman who lived in Perris, she was staying with her husband’s brother and his wife. Her sister-in-law had family in Philadelphia. So while Ethel and the kids were living with them, this sister-in-law went to Philadelphia. She got on the train in Colton and went to Philadelphia and, you know, those bastards followed her from her house, to the train, and went all the way to Philadelphia with her. And here it wasn’t even the wife, it was the sister-in-law!
I stayed there on the farm for five years. My dad kept gas in the car and I got enough from the Party to keep us in clothes and keep us going. I saw Archie a few times in that period. It was very complicated and it took a lot of planning. The first time, we spent a week on the beach with the four kids. I forget the immediate detail for each one, but always I would leave home in my own car and I would change cars. It was always this kind of switching cars around and switching drivers and making sure that nobody was following us. We had some weird tricks, like he would get off at a place where there was an overpass and he could walk over to the other side and I would be there. I think we did it three times in the five years. The last time was in the summer of ’55, and already the Party was changing policy and people were coming up for air, so to speak. I think they had decided that fascism wasn’t as close as they had measured it.
A radical out of San Antonio, Texas, Sylvia Thompson joined the People’s Education and Press Association, a Communist Party affiliate, during World War Two. Not long after, she met and married Sam Hall, a Party organizer from Alabama (she tells their story under “Fighting Jim Crow”). Her second husband, Robert Thompson, was a highly decorated war hero and, at the time of his death, chairman of the New York State Communist Party. (For the fight to bury him in a national cemetery, see “The Arlington Case.”)
Because of the atmosphere created by the Smith Act trials and what had happened in Birmingham and the fact that Sam had been arrested and tried for vagrancy,1 we decided there was just no way we could live as open Communists in the South and be effective.
I was underground for six years, three and a half before Sam died, two and a half afterwards. We lived all over the South, constantly changing names. Sam did his writing, he had a weekly column for the Southern Worker.2 I continued to work with Southern people, whatever union work was being done, whatever civil rights work was being done. We were trying to broaden a progressive population, to turn people’s thinking around. It was a question of sitting down and discussing how to make people see the oppression of the Jim Crow system.
We got out a program specifically addressed to Southern people, and mailed out about one hundred and twenty-five thousand fliers. The mailing was done in every state by people who used Band-Aids on their fingertips so there’d be no fingerprints on the envelopes. I remember they were all mailed from every state at the same moment, and when it came out in the newspapers, one writer said, “It’s simple—somebody left New York with the trunk full of those pamphlets and went through every state and just mailed them out.” And someone else answered that that couldn’t be because they were all mailed out at the same time.
But in Birmingham the way we would sometimes put out fliers on important issues was that a couple of us, men and women, would go into the big department stores and at a certain time would open a window in the rest room and throw them out. The fliers would just scatter all over the main streets of Birmingham. That was an old method in the South of putting out leaflets, rather than standing on the corner and getting arrested.
When you said you wanted to see me, I started thinking, “What are the big events in my life?” It’s almost a morbid topic, but I started thinking about the deaths of both of my husbands. Sam Hall died under another name. He had a brain tumor. We came up to New York to see doctors, and although we had the best neurosurgeon in the country, it didn’t help.
The moment he died, I told the doctors at the hospital that his name was not William Brown, it was Sam Hall, and the next day the cops came to where I was staying to ask why he changed his name. I let them know that when he was ill, he didn’t want his family in the South to find out about it. We didn’t know it was going to end up that way. His illness went so quickly that there wasn’t even time. Had the cancer been in another place, then I could have discussed with him what it was he wanted to do for the rest of his life. But there was not that kind of time. Neither one of us knew what was going to happen until about two months before he died.
When we were underground, the FBI was constantly trying to find out where we were. It’s fascinating, because when I look through my FBI file now, I know when they knew where we were and when they didn’t. The one time they did find out, Sam had been traveling and was staying in a motel overnight. When he checked out the next day, the head of the motel said to him, “Fellow, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got a couple of cars watching for you.” So Sam came back to the city where we were living and we found another apartment, paid the rent, and started moving all of our things. We never got to that apartment. With the last load we had, a couple of suitcases, we kept driving for about seven or eight hours, three states away. They were so used to our making all these trips back and forth. [Laughs.] We just abandoned all that stuff.
I found out through my FBI file how wonderful my mother was at that time. She would go for months and never knew where I was. One of my reports said, “Agent blank approached the subject’s mother and asked, ‘What are you doing for the Christmas holidays?’ Subject’s mother replies, ‘No plans.’ Agent blank asks, ‘Where are your children?’ Subject’s mother answers, ‘My son’s in Texas at law school and my daughter’s in California.’ And Agent blank says, ‘Where’s your other daughter?’ Subject’s mother says, ‘I never know where she is. She has such a wonderful life, she’s always traveling and vacationing, now I think she’s in Havana.’ ” So the next few pages are from some fancy hotels in Havana: “Subject has not been seen at this hotel.” And then there’s one from a “reliable informant” saying, “Subject has not been seen at any meetings around here.” We’re talking about the early 1950s, when only very wealthy people went to Havana to gamble. And I began to giggle, mixed with anger. The time, the money, the effort, all of that. In the meantime, my mother with all of her middle-class Texas charm being able to say that, I loved it.
I got my FBI file in ’78 or ’79. My lawyer who was helping me said, “Mrs. Thompson, they say they have thirty-two hundred pages on you.” And I said, “Sons of bitches, half my life and that’s all they’ve got?” But it’s very scary looking through those papers, they were clearly interested in arresting me: “Subject, Smith Act, 1940. Detention.”3
Joe Passen joined the Young Communist League in 1938, then moved to the Communist Party in 1945. Before leaving the Party in 1956, he drove a cab and worked sub rosa to bring union democracy to Teamsters Local 265.
I was a courier for Archie Brown and some others. This was around ’53, I was working as a Teamster then. Couriers were on call twenty-four hours a day. I would get a message from somebody. Wherever I had to go, I went; and if I had a job, I just phoned in sick.
I’d pick Archie up and he’d say, “We’re going to go to L.A.—start driving, man.” [Laughs.] I had my car. He’d pay for the gas. One time, he was going to stay with his father-in-law I guess, who lived outside of L.A. We were on a country road. They had one of those pea-soup fogs, real low, and around eight, nine o’clock at night, after driving eight hours or more, I’m really beat. I can’t see shit. I said, “Arch, I don’t know what the hell we’re going to do but I can’t even see the line on the road.” So he had to walk in front of me, that’s how slow we were going.
Other times, I would make deliveries to people I didn’t know, messages in sealed envelopes. I never really knew what the hell it was. I wasn’t the least bit interested, either. Those meetings were always set up by somebody else, nothing was ever set up by me. We’d meet at a certain place, at a certain time. And you had to be very exact, we’re talking about two or three minutes within a designated time, otherwise I would leave. Normally, I could spot these people by where they were waiting—never in an area where we couldn’t see what was going on around us. I’d spot them, say, “Hello, everything okay?” and hand them the envelope. They were always hungry for a little conversation.
Normally, I’d be delivering money. Until they found jobs, a lot of people underground had no money at all, so the Party had to see that they got money to live on, pay the rent and so on. I imagine that’s what it was most about.
We had to take precautions. I don’t know how sophisticated the FBI was in those days. I guess they were pretty good. When I went to meet Arch, I’d never just stop and wait for him. I’d always see what cars were there, drive around three or four blocks, see if there was anybody that I could recognize, a car or something. I was always on the lookout that I might be followed. At night, it was very difficult, all you could spot were headlights.
Going underground was a horrible mistake. It was the worst thing that the national level could’ve decided on. Whether that direction came from abroad or not, I don’t know those answers. It just was horrible.
I know people who went underground who really suffered very badly. Guys went through an awful lot just to stay underground and survive. Things started getting fucked up, people getting disgusted, discouraged, families broken up. The husband would be in hiding, the wife would be someplace else.
I know people who had our top leaders, on the state level, hiding at their places. They fed them and took care of them—safe houses I guess you would call them. They must have thought that the government was really going to send them to jail, break up their families. They really overrated the thing terribly.
But I tell you, if I had been picked to go underground, I would have gone, so would my wife. When you are as dedicated as we were, even though we beefed about certain other things—but what we thought was very necessary at the time proved to be just a bunch of bullshit. Looking back, I’m so glad that I was never picked. Jesus Christ, I had enough trouble.
Joe Passen died at seventy-nine on June 6, 1992.
Fay Blake joined the Young Communist League as a teenager. By 1942 she was a member of the Communist Party, active in organized labor and tenants’ unions. She left the Party in 1956.
I was a courier from 1948 to about 1954. Two of the people I was a courier for I actually escorted into the underground. I have never given up regretting it. I never saw them again and I wish I could tell them how sorry I am that I was involved at all—it was such a bunch of nonsense. Not that I think it actually wrecked people’s lives, but it certainly made them more uncomfortable and more unhappy than they needed to be.
This was a young couple I knew. I worked briefly in an insurance company doing this terrible office work. There was a young woman, a good deal younger than I, who worked in the same place, and we got quite friendly with each other. I began to do things with her and she was very open to what I was interested in. So gradually I began to talk to her about some of my political interests. She came from a middle-class family, had never had any experience before, but she came right along, she was really ready. In the course of going to various activities, I introduced her to a young man I knew who was in the Party, and the two of them hit it off like that [slaps hands], they were a couple from the first time they met.
Finally somebody from the national office came and spent a whole afternoon with me telling me about this brand-new brilliant idea they had to develop an underground. He told me what some of the problems were and that he needed people to go into it. And for some ungodly reason I’ll never forgive myself for, I suggested this young couple. For one thing, because they didn’t have families and they were kind of footloose—they could take off if they wanted to. He asked me to talk to them and I did and they said yes, just like that.
So then it was a matter of shepherding them through this. First of all, the three of us sat down together to decide what names they would take. I sent him off to get a new Social Security card—this should have been a hint to us how we were tripping ourselves up. We had decided on a name for him, I don’t remember now, but say, Robert Johnson. His own name was, we’ll say, James Jackson. He goes to get his new Social Security card, and he comes back so crestfallen. He said, “I started to fill out the application and before I knew what I had done I filled my own name!” So his new Social Security card had the same first name. [Laughs.] Then I sent her to get her Social Security card.
Oh, we had to get them married. They had been living together, and this was too risky. So we had to find somebody who would marry them quick. I remember, you had to wait three days for the venereal disease test, and they were supposed to go off right away. I had to plead with this big shot—“You’ve got to wait, I don’t know how to get them married in less than three days.” So they hung around for three more days. We had to work up a whole curriculum vitae for them, where they had been born and where they worked, all that kind of stuff. Then they took them underground. I remember driving them to some address and then I never saw them again.
But I did one additional thing that was strictly against everything I had been told. I knew that this young man’s mother worked as a practical nurse in an old people’s home in Los Angeles. Once you went underground, you weren’t supposed to make contact with your families or tell them anything. She knew her boy was politically active, but didn’t have a clue. I knew that for him to just disappear would be devastating for her.
So this kept eating at me, and finally one day I just couldn’t resist it. I got on the streetcar and I trudged out to where his mother was working and I asked to see her. She came out and I said, “I just wanted to tell you that James is fine and that even if he doesn’t write, he’s thinking of you.” I turned around and walked out and the tears were coming down my cheeks and down her cheeks. I just wanted her to know. Otherwise, she’d be left never knowing what had happened. It could have been forever that she’d never see him again.
I never told my big shot that I had done this, because I knew he’d scream and rant and climb up the walls. But I just couldn’t leave that woman without some word that her son was okay.
There’s never been much attention paid in or out of the Party to the people who did a lot of the Jimmie Higgins1 work that made it possible for this underground. Sometimes there’d be a knock on the door and somebody would say, “You have to find a safe hotel room.” I would go to some sleazy hotel on Hollywood Boulevard or somewhere and rent a room for that night. Then I wouldn’t turn up for the room, but somebody else would. They were hiding out, they wouldn’t leave the room. They’d send me to deliver a message to somebody. I would provide books because they’d come with nothing to read.
I even got my poor mother involved. Some of the guys who had gone underground left very precipitously. They left without money, without anything. So one of the problems that they kept running into was how do you find a clean shirt for yourself when you haven’t got any money, when you can’t go to a laundry, and you’ve only got one shirt? At that time there wasn’t any wash-and-wear.
So my mother, who was a very good seamstress and a very good person, went to the fabric store and bought a bolt of seersucker. They didn’t make ready-made seersucker shirts. You could wash it in your hotel basin and hang it up and put it on. She ran up, I don’t know, a dozen shirts, and I distributed them to these guys who were on the run. So I at least got them shirts that they could wash overnight and get into again.
The things I remember are such trivialities. I remember among the books that I brought once to one of these guys was Hard Times by Charles Dickens, because it has a strike in it and I thought he’d be interested in a nineteenth-century version of a very bitter strike. So I bring him the book and when he’s ready to leave, I come back to send him on his way and he throws the book back at me saying, “What’d you bring me this piece of bourgeois crap for?” [Laughs.] Because, after all, Dickens wasn’t a Marxist. It’s not one of his best books, but it’s a pretty good book! So I said, “Okay, I’ve learned a lesson, next time I’ll just bring you Party literature—that’s all you seem to be able to appreciate.” Well, he didn’t want Party literature—that was so deadly dull!
1One of those purged was Harry Hay, who went on to form the Mattachine Society, the forerunner of the gay liberation movement of the 1960s.
1Site of the federal courthouse in New York City where the first Smith Act trial of Party leadership took place in 1949.
1Radical lawyer from San Francisco, one of Harry Bridges’s defense attorneys, and presidential candidate on the Progressive Party ticket in 1952.
1Sam Hall was tried for vagrancy despite that fact that he was gainfully employed by the Daily Worker. But the head of the Birmingham Red Squad ruled that his means of support were “disreputable” and that the only work he ever saw Hall doing was “digging up his garden and hanging out clothes.” Immediately after Hall’s conviction, Birmingham passed an ordinance mandating that all Communists had forty-eight hours to leave town or face imprisonment.
2The Sunday regional edition of the Daily Worker. There was an earlier Party newspaper published out of Chattanooga called the Southern Worker, which ceased publication in 1937. Sam Hall also wrote for a short-lived publication called the Southern News Almanac, which survived from January 1940 to November 1941.
3The “Detention” designation became familiar to many radicals as they acquired their FBI files through the Freedom of Information Act. It referred to Hoover’s Custodial Detentipn list of persons to be rounded up and imprisoned in concentration camps should the need arise. Hoover ordered the preparation of the list in 1939, on his own initiative and without statutory authority. From 1950 to its repeal in 1971, Title II of the McCarran Act gave Hoover legal sanction for the list. Although it was supposedly discontinued in 1975 by congressional order, M. Wesley Swearingen, a former FBI agent (see under “Hounds”), contends that it still exists, albeit under another guise.
1Jimmie Higgins is the prototype of the tireless and dedicated worker who performs without complaint the tasks of an organizing campaign. This mythical character was originally created by Ben Hanford, Eugene Debs’s running mate in the 1904 presidential election. In 1917, Upton Sinclair published a pacifist novel titled Jimmie Higgins.