The New Way

Excerpts from The New Way: An Oral History of the First Cultural Revolutionby Studs Terkel (Chicago: Vanguard Press, 1975)

Herman Jones Schmitt ​

_Commissar, the Chicago Cooperative Bottling Plant. His career began after his appointment in 1934. He has not missed a day of work since.

He was born into socialism. His German immigrant father was arrested during the Great War, his mother was a labor organizer. He and his siblings (two brothers, two sisters) were all involved in Party politics for years before the Revolution.

His office is full of mementos. A framed picture of Eugene Debs and Vladimir Lenin. A photo of him shaking hands with Mikhail Frunze during his Chicago visit. A photo of him and his family.
”The First Cultural Revolution really set the framework for how we as a nation would conduct ourselves. During the World Revolutionary War, during the Horn of Africa, Indochina, the Congo and now the changes happening in our society now. It really set ourselves apart as a socialist society.”

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“In ‘34, I was approached to lead up the political education of the workers at the newly cooperatized bottling plant in the South Side. I was familiar to them when I had helped organize strikes during the Depression. Their workers were still new to the idea of a democratic workplace, so they wanted an experienced educator to show the new way of working.

I started with my new duty as soon as the first meeting of plant workers concluded. I watched as the first democratic election was held to elect the first foreman. Unlike today, the vote was held with a show of hands, a very simple process. They overwhelmingly choose their local union representative from the pre-Revolution period. He came up, and gave a speech to keep the plant working and show that the workers could do as well as the capitalist managers.

I then prepared my first presentation of my new job, before the workers came in. I brought several pamphlets from the local CulSec office, and circulated them. I then discussed the basics of Marxism to the workers. How the ideas that originated within the Communist Manifesto and Capital were being brought to life within these halls at this very instance.

There was a lot of boredom at first, but gradually, they got used to the ideas espoused. One day, I was running across the halls, when I saw an argument between the foreman and one of the workers. It was over the rate of the machines, which the worker felt could be increased with some grease. I was able to settle the dispute and got a recount. The worker who argued for increased grease got elected the new foreman.

[…]

“My proudest moment was watching all the workers mobilize for the ‘36 election. With our numbers, we sent several Party representatives to the District Soviet. I campaigned long and I campaigned hard for the Party and it was a guaranteed win. And we here at the plant were all still big supporters of the Party, through the War up until the Split.”

Pablo Singh ​

_Operating Manager, California Housing Cooperative Alliance, 1934-1964

“My father was a farm worker from Punjab. Came to California in 1910 with other Punjabi workers. Met my mother, a young Mexican woman, and married her. Became involved with the farm workers union in the 20’s, involved us when we were young, and by 1928, I was a young union official. In 1934, I was appointed because of my experience in the farm workers union to the Housing coops across California”_

During the ‘30’s, my work was about settlement. Helping new rural transplants get settled into their new homes.

I was a rural Punjabi-Mexican, so I regularly spoke to Mexicans and Punjabis who were moving into the new housing developments springing up in the desert, and helped them get settled, find appropriate food, and ensure they were well-taken care of. I also set up Chinese and Japanese farm workers with their own coops, and saw their own communities spring up around them. And of course, you had the Okies comin’ in, trying to start their own new lives on the West Coast.

The biggest hassle was the paperwork. Trying to set up rooms, keeping track of numbers: room number, number of people, identification numbers, room associations with identifications. You ever read that Russian novel We?

[Yes.]

…. Then you know what I mean. I was stuck trying to figure out everything, trying to plan everything out.

I also had to keep the coops supplied. The residents mostly took care of that themselves, but we still had to make sure that everyone was well-fed and healthy.

In those early years, it was very chaotic and you had a lot of friction. Sometimes, you had neighbor disputes reach my level. Sometimes, you had conflicts between movie cooperatives and the housing developments in LA. Then you had to deal with the jurisdiction issues. Communities coming to blows with each other, problems with complaints getting lost in the shuffle.

It was really chaotic, but gradually, as everything evened out and the country really got going, I started to get into the groove of things. Everything seemed to get easier. Disputes were better settled, communities steadily got along, coops continued to spring up. Not to say we hadn’t had any issues after those first few years (I might need to tell you about some of the things that happened during the war if you ever get to it), but it got easier once we had a full idea on what operating a socialist society would actually entail.

Emma Salomons ​

Author, Dawn, Morning, Dusk, aka The America Chronicles.

_Emma grew up in relative luxury with her banker father, mother, and brother in Munich. Then, the Nazis came into power, and gradually, she and her family would face the full scale of Nazi oppression. Her father lost his job; she and her brother were taken out of school in concern for their safety, and they were continually harassed by all corners of Gentile German society.

In 1936, her father was able to get a visa under the Foster-Reed refugee program, and was able to get him and his family to America.

“People ask what the main inspiration for the America Chronicles were. It was reading about the immigrant experience, and especially seeing the Statue of Liberty. That struck me, since that was my own first image of America as the ship came to Manhattan island.”

By 1937, Emma and her family were resettled in Haywood City._

“The Great Salt Lake was much different from either Munich or New York. A lot drier. Very sunny. More mountainous. When we settled here, my father took us out there to help us ‘understand the locality.’ I felt it was meant as our first vacation in a long while. It felt great. The first time since the Nazis took away my family’s safety that we truly felt the way we did back in Germany.

When we moved to Haywood, we were resettled in a new commune along with other Jewish refugees. My father got a job at the local Union bank, while my mother ended up teaching Jewish history at the commune center space.

As for my brother and me, we were set up at a local high school. Our grasp of English was still tenuous, but luckily, there was already a class for recent immigrants or children whose first language isn’t English. For the first time, we met multiple people of other cultures and languages. Still, as is human tendency, we gravitated towards other German speakers. Either refugees like us or the children of recent immigrants.

The biggest memory of the period was the new classroom structure. Back in Germany, the teacher was a taskmaster. Dominant, authoritative. She was a presence to be obeyed.

Our homeroom teacher was a small, kindly old woman named Eleanor. She would engage us, encourage us to challenge her, inform her, tell her our stories. She never disciplined anyone, but engaged in debate.

As we shared our own experiences, she would talk about her own life. Her family had been in Utah since the time of Brigham Young. She had been a schoolteacher for over 30 years, but was excited by the new approach by Dewey etc, and felt it was superior to her previous experience. I grew very fond of these stories and their very rustic feel. Looking back, her stories reminded me of the Karl May stories I had adored as a child, so my brother and I were entranced by the stories of simple Western living.

We soon had other Mormon friends. We would play in the school yard. They would host joint events in their churches for school events, including dances and cookouts. They were a most hospitable people, and they never attempted to proselytize or convert us. They had largely accepted the Revolution and the resulting changes, while maintaining some aspects of their previous lives. That said, there was definitely friction between the reconstructionist tendencies of the revolutionary government, and some in the LDS Church, who didn’t like to have to give up some of their practices or who they were now forced to accept into their church as part of the Haywood Pact[1]. Others still were resentful for what they perceived as continued oppression by the government, and joined the Sons of Liberty.

Slowly, my father started growing accustomed to his new settings. Bought a bolo tie and a cowboy hat, and started wearing it to work. It must have worked; he was elected the head of the Haywood City Bank.

John C. Stennis ​

_Former political prisoner; Current Prisoner Rights Activist.

The son of a middle class family and a former lawyer, he joined the Native Sons of the Confederacy to battle what he had perceived as the threat of Bolshevism. He, a young man named John Higgins, and a displaced plantation owner named Harold Spencer plotted the assassination of commissar Vernon Thomas in his district. However, neither him nor Spencer knew that Higgins was secretly a StateSec informant, who turned the two in for conspiracy to murder.

“They brought me to a tiny room, and sat me down, with them prepared to extract information from me. I emerged after 12 hours of yelling and dehydration ready to confess.”

Spencer was sent to Parchman Farms, a local New Afrikan prison, while Stennis was sent up to Joliet Prison in Illinois, both now part of the Special Prison Administration._

“Every day began with a wake-up at 8AM. We would assemble in the prison yard for a count. We would sing the Internationale as a group, before we would go to work.

We would work digging ditches or working in chain gangs for several hours, excluding breaks for lunch and relaxation. The admins would make sure we were working hard, and would yell to ensure we worked faster. In the chain gang, we would mostly walk around and help with public works with the government and volunteer workers. We were treated well, especially by public officials who themselves were imprisoned at some point.

However, we were at the mercy of the guards and the officials, who would find any reason to suspect that we were engaged in sabotage and would send us into isolation if there were any sort of infraction. I was myself sent into isolation several times for “attempted sabotage”.

Our breaks were spent in the yard. We had a large sports area, with a rugby field and a basketball court. We had a library full of literature from communist and socialist thinkers. Initially, I was part of a group who was very firmly reactionary. They were convinced that they were arrested because they were true Americans, who were biding their time before they could launch an attack that could restore the rightful Constitutional government. For a while, I was part of that contingency.

Every Wednesday, we were required to sit through a seminar with a commissar, who would teach about Marxist philosophy for several hours.

In our case, it was a young African named Greene, from Chicago. He was very passionate about his teaching, regularly dissecting the works, discussing their limitations and criticism, and also talking about anarchist philosophy, describing the difference between the two.

For whatever reason, Greene took a special interest in me and one day, sat near me for lunch.

He began by talking about how he had seen how Africans and Southern whites like him could unite against a common threat during his time in the Spartacist Guard and the Civil War. He then gave me a copy of the Communist Manifesto, and told me to read and annotate it.

I scoffed at first, then figured I could learn their strategies by their grand texts. Then, I started reading, and after going through it and Marx’s other works, I slowly began to come around on socialism. Most notably, I began to read his works on crime, and how he wouldn’t care much for the system I found myself in.

This quote remains in mind: “Punishment in general has been defended as a means either of ameliorating or of intimidating. Now what right have you to punish me for the amelioration or intimidation of others?”

Ephraim Cassius ​

_84 years old. Former farming collective foreman.

“My mother and father were good, God-fearing people. Read the Bible everyday before bed. Went to church every Sunday. Sang every hymn, said every Hallelujah. Named all of us children after folks in the Bible. Joseph, Jacob, Abraham, Rachel, Sarah, and me, Ephraim. My father would’ve hated it if he’d live to see me change my name. Even in his old age, he hated when I got involved with the Spartacists. ‘Gonna get yourself killed.’ Still, having been born into slavery and having seen the terror of the KKK, I think he probably understood.”_

“In the ‘30’s, the idea of communal farming was still new to many of us in the South. Even to former organizers like us, we hadn’t known what would replace the sharecropper system that we had spent the pre-Revolution period destroying.

When the African Republic came around, we knocked down the fences that separated the farms, and incorporated them all into farms we’d be operating collectively. Less hours in the sun, no more overseers, no more white owners treating us like they did before the War Between the States.

One of my friends and fellow organizers, another sharecropper named Elias, was presumed to become the winner of the election to lead the farming. Then, we received a visit from a Party man. He was named, uh, hang in there one minute….

Johnson! Yeah, yeah, Johnson. He was some carpetbagger from Harlem. Wore a baggy suit, with some decorations. Spoke very sophisticated, with those big German words I’d hear sometimes from the Northern volunteers. He said that because of increased government funding, they were bringing in apparatchik to ensure that the new communal farms were run with the most efficiency possible. He introduced this other man in a suit, Jack even younger than him, as “helping” with the new communal farms, and “encouraging” us to vote for him.

We all did, because we assumed we couldn’t do this by ourselves and needed some party influence.

[…]

Pretty soon issues began to arise. Our work hours had been shortened a little, but we had to reach some quotas that Jack imposed on us, because the almanacs showed other cooperatives were producing more this time of year. We were perpetually short on supplies. We were growing new crops based on Jack’s recommendations, even though we didn’t know how to grow or nurture them.

Whenever we’d bring complaints to him, he’d just say that he’d bring it up at the next Soviet meeting. That was his excuse for eight months. Finally, I went to a local Party official, and apparently, Jack hadn’t even brought the complaints up!

I also learned that his old man was some big wig Party member in Chicago, and this was apparently a way of getting him “experience”, before packing up for Chicago.

[…]

Eventually, we went on strike, and filed a formal complaint. It was another year or so before Jack was finally “removed” to a higher position. They sent another Party member, this time an actual expert from the Agricultural Secretariat.

Heard Jack was arrested in a Lake Michigan dacha years later for a murder. Couldn’t say I was surprised.

[1] An agreement reached between the Workers’ Communist Party and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in late 1933, securing support for the new communist government and some reform in exchange for official recognition of the LDS Church. Named for late Utah organizer “Big Bill” Haywood.

*[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation