I ran into Fred in November 1996 at an art gallery opening in Manhattan's west twenties. I knew him casually in the early 1980s but lost touch after he moved to Hollywood. He had now returned to New York for good.
Fred told me once that he sang in Communist Party choruses of the 40s and 50s. This period weighed on my mind lately since I identified strongly with "50s radicals," who were rebels against bourgeois normalcy in those desperate times. Now that I was a "90s radical" and wandering about in a different sort of desert, I wanted to examine and write about that earlier period.
I decided to invite him to be interviewed a "50s radicals" project. I had already lined up legendary socialist and pacifist David MacReynolds, a key figure in the Vietnam antiwar movement. I told Fred that I was not interested in his background in organized politics as such, but more in his identification with the CP culture of his youth. Fred was born in 1932 and had been engaged culturally and artistically with leftist causes for the better part of fifty years. I wanted to find out how his early experiences in the CPUSA cultural milieu had shaped his later life.
While the party no longer enjoyed the support it had during its heyday, I marveled at how many people continued to be touched and inspired by membership in the organization or the front groups it sponsored. A new socialist movement would have to draw from what was positive in all the important left formations of the last 100 years. This meant studying the IWW, Debs's Socialist Party or the Communist Party, the most compromised of all the major groups.
My 60s generation of the 1960s accepted without question that the CPUSA was pure evil, as was Stalin. We decided to do everything completely different from the stodgy "old left" CP. This was a huge mistake since there was much of value in the legacy that the CP left. The party had sunk deep roots in American society while the ultra- radical groups we spawned withered on the vine. Our biggest problem was that we didn't know how to relate to the ordinary working person.
The New Leftists held the Archie and Edith Bunker figures of their imagination in contempt, but made no attempt to get past the stereotype. Trotskyism and Maoism paid all sorts of lip-service to the "proletariat" but was always too wrapped up in dogma and rhetoric to make any kind of serious breakthrough the way the CPUSA had.
Fred liked my proposal and agreed to participate. There was one proviso: since he was making a movie about his own life, he wanted to film my interviews with him. Since Fred had learned eight years earlier that he was HIV positive, the film would have an urgency that none of his previous projects did. A number of other well-known writers and film-makers with the illness had also created important works lately. One of the was Harold Brodkey, whose brutally self- aware New Yorker articles contrasted sharply with the glitzy ads and articles editor Tina Brown favored.
Fred made it clear to me that his film would unstinting. One of his goals was to make sense of his life and his artistic accomplishments. He made a number of artistically significant films, but he also made pornography. He was a family man, but he also was a debaucher. He believed that he contracted the AIDS virus while making the rounds in Philippine whorehouses. His mother once warned him not to "krich arein", Yiddish for "wander about." Idiomatically, the phrase means something closer to crawl around in the garbage when used with the proper facial expression and tone of voice.
The film had not yet touched on his political commitments and that was where I would fit in. He would be happy to let me interview him just as long as I would agree to be part of the film. I was cast as the Interviewer, my first screen role. My questions were just what he needed to draw out his leftist past. Up till now, the film was mostly about his sex life, including his 5 year battle with HIV. He was now all set to talk about politics, because that was just as much a party of his story as sex.
Fred's family was Communist to the core in the 1930s, long before McCarthyism gave the party a dirty name and before Stalin's crimes had become widely known to the general public. Identification with the Soviet Union came easy for many poverty-stricken immigrants during the depression, especially Eastern European Jews. The Soviet Union seemed like the only nation on earth that was ready to defend Jews and working people against Hitler.
This fact and the willingness of the Communist Party to fight for trade union rights and social justice in the USA made it particularly attractive to working-class Jewish New Yorkers, especially those in the garment industry. These "Jews Without Money", as CP novelist Mike Gold put it, saw themselves as exploited. Moreover, their class identification was much stronger than their religious or ethnic identification. The holocaust and the Zionist response, combined with growing affluence in the Jewish community, eroded this class outlook.
The famous trade union battles of the 1930s in cities like Chicago and Detroit, led by people like the young Walter Reuther or Jimmy Hoffa, brought powerful industrial unions like the UAW or the Teamsters to birth. Without these unions, working people would have never been able to enjoy the relative affluence WWII and Cold War military spending created. Before the 1930s there were no industrial unions. In shops where unions did exist, they were organized along craft lines. This meant that in a big factory machinists belonged to one union while welders to another, and so forth. Furthermore, unskilled workers very often had no union representation whatsoever. They were poorly treated and underpaid.
In an industrial union, everybody who worked in the same factory belonged to the same union, ideally not only within the shop but throughout the entire nation. When all steel workers, teamsters, miners or auto workers go on strike at the same time, their power is magnified. At the start of the Great Depression the Communist Party placed a great emphasis on building industrial unions everywhere. By increasing the economic power of workers, their political power would be increased as well.
Not only did the bosses the bosses exploit craft divisions, they took advantage of racial, national and gender differences as well. This was an especially big problem in the garment industry, where many workers in the same factory often came from different European nations and regarded each other's nationality as a bitter foe. Beginning with the IWW, American radicals had been fighting to overcome these differences for more than a generation. The Communist Party was simply the latest expression of this fight for unity among the ranks of labor and industrial unions would be the crowning victory.
What many people would be surprised to find out is that the furriers of New York were among the first to put their bodies on the line to create industrial unions. Fred's father Harry Baker, a fur industry cutter, was in the middle of one of the most important trade union organizing fights of the 1930s, one that took place in the garment district of New York.
The garment district occupies the west side of Manhattan between 14th Street and 42nd Street. In the 1920s and 30s most of the workers were Jewish.. In the 1990s entrepreneurs have converted many of the old garment lofts into high technology workshops, or trendy art galleries of the type where I met Fred. However, many continue to turn out fur coats and slacks the way they used to in the 1930s, using nearly the same tools.
Today many of the workers are Chinese and Latino and work in non- unionized sweatshops. Working conditions and wages are as bad as they were before radicals transformed the garment industry. The oppressive conditions many workers face today are a product of the great purge of the Communists in the 1950s, most especially those who had led the heroic Furriers Union.
Harry Baker eventually quit the furrier trade and the CPUSA to open up New York's celebrated Second Avenue delicatessen. He left the working-class, but the union movement remained very much on his mind. Fred remembers his father in a hospital bed as he lay dying of emphysema, drifting in and out of consciousness. Several days before his death, Harry gripped his son's hand and told him how anxious he was about the upcoming furriers union convention in Atlantic City, an event that took place forty years earlier in 1939.
That convention had resulted in the merger of the furrier and leather workers unions. Some officials in the leather workers unions officials opposed the merger because they feared losing their posts. The leather workers had a much larger union and a mostly Irish membership. These officials tried to red-bait and Jew-bait the furrier union leaders Ben Gold and Irving Potash, but the rank-and-file workers ignored them and voted for merger, putting class interest above petty prejudice.
(The eight year old Fred Baker, his two sisters and mother stood outside on the boardwalk and passed the time as the two sides battled over the merger question inside. They struck up a conversation with a group of vacationing Midwesterners who soon joined them in singing the popular song "Roll Out the Barrel". Fred's mother was worried that the vacationers had stuck a new verse into the song, "Let's get the Jews on the run." It was 1938 after all.)
Long after the labor battles of the 1930s had ended, Harry Baker often drove miles out of the way on his way upstate to the Jewish resort area for summer vacations. He wanted to show his family the scene of one of the most memorable organizing drives of the furriers union. This was one the Middletown plant of A. Hollander and Sons, one of the biggest and cruelest employers in the fur dressing and dyeing industry in the 1920s and 30s.
This company had the reputation of being the "Ford of the Fur industry" since like Ford Motors it was infamous for terrorizing union organizers in during the 1930s. Middletown was a mostly gentile farming community that had much more in common culturally with the rest of New York state than the heavily Jewish Sullivan County, their destination and home of many famous resort hotels such as the Concord and Grossingers. As he drove slowly past the plant, Harry Becker would point at the plant and remind his children of the battles his union fought there.
One of the martyrs in the fight with Hollander was Morris Langer. He led the organizing drive at Hollander plants in Newark where workers made $6 to $10 for sixty to seventy-two hour weeks. On March 22 1933 he fell victim to a car-bomb and died 4 days later. Ten thousand garment workers, including Harry Baker, marched in the funeral procession that night. They started on 28th street in Manhattan and moved slowly up Seventh Avenue to 40th street, then eastward to the Queensboro Bridge to the cemetery in Long Island where they buried Morris Langer. In the hall of the furrier's union, they placed a sign beneath Langer's picture that stated, "We Will Remember Morris Langer By Building A Greater Union.."
Who murdered Morris Langer? There is little doubt that it was the gangsters who operated in collusion with corrupt garment union officials and anti-labor employers like Hollander. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter and Jacob (Gurrah) Shapiro led a powerful gang that intimidated boss and worker alike. Their gang was part of the infamous "Murder Incorporated" syndicate. When I was growing up in the Catskills, everybody was aware of the cruelty of this underworld mob. Swan Lake, in Liberty, not ten miles from my home was the place where Murder Incorporated hit-men threw their victims.
The real life Jewish gangsters of Murder Incorporated had none of the raffish charm of characters in the movie "Bugsy Siegal", a well-known Murder Incorporated member. Louis (Lepke) Buchalter, who made his living as an extortionist in the garment industry, came from a very conventional middle-class background. Lepke had the same appetites as any noveau-riche businessman in the garment district, but satisfied them through intimidation and murder rather than ordinary exploitation of the working class. His hulking and dull-witted partner Gurrah provided the muscle for the rather unimposing Lepke.
The notion that organized crime owes its start in prohibition is not entirely accurate. While some hoodlums made their fortunes in prostitution, bootlegging or drugs, many gangsters such as Lepke and Albert Anastasia got their start hiring out as strike-breakers. They also went to work for craft unions in the garment industry who preferred to hire mob muscle to intimidate the employer at contract time, rather than rely on the strength of the rank-and-file. Communists like Ben Gold and Irving Potash believed that gangsters had no place in the union movement. This put them on a collision course with manufacturers like the Hollanders and old line craft union bureaucrats. Gangsters, allied to both factions, had no interest in clean and democratic unions. That was why they staged an assault on the Furriers Industrial Union headquarters on April 24, 1933.
At ten am on that date, fifteen members of Lepke's gang stormed the union building at 131 West 28th Street. Armed with revolvers, knives and lead pipes, they found twenty or so workers in the union offices on the ground floor and attacked everybody in sight. The receptionist screamed "Gangsters! Gangsters!" into the intercom connected to second-floor union offices where Ben Gold and other leaders were meeting.
Gold and the other men then raced downstairs and began to fight with the gangsters. They had no fear of Lepke's sluggers. Irving Potash had fought with them at a picket line three years earlier and suffered stab wounds so grievous that doctors at New York Hospital were sure he would die. As soon as the wounds healed, he went back to union affairs.
The furriers were prepared this time. Somebody from the union ran out onto 7th Avenue and blew a whistle in a prearranged signal and started screaming, "Gangsters in the union building!" Immediately hundreds of furriers downed their tools and ran to the union lobby where the fighting was in progress. They braved bullets and knives and attacked the gangsters from all sides. One furrier, Harry Gottlieb, died from bullet wounds. Harry Baker was one of the furriers who came to the aid of their union that day and lived to tell of it.
By the time police arrived, the gangsters had either been beaten into submission or fled. Police arrested the six gangsters who furriers had knocked the stuffing out of. A New York Daily News photo in the next day's edition shows the dazed and beaten thugs stretched out on the sidewalk surrounded by cops. They dab bloody noses while holding their tattered suits together.
New York's garment unions were highly politicized during the 1930s. The divisions mapped to the great schism that the Russian Revolution caused within the socialist movement. The old time craft unions identified with the Menshevik faction in Russia while the radicals who were trying to build industrial unions looked to Lenin and Bolshevik Party for inspiration. After the great stock market crash in 1929, the more radical vision of the Communists began to make a lot of sense to many workers and they flooded into its ranks.
The left wing that emerged out of this split in the socialist movement not only fostered the growth of industrial unions. It also inspired the growth of an important neighborhood-based left-wing organization called the International Workers Order (IWO) that was much larger than the Communist Party itself. In Jewish working-class neighborhoods of the 1930s and 40s, the IWO had a massive membership, including many of the Jews who toiled in the garment industry. The IWO was a very important part of the daily life of the Baker family, including Fred himself.
Indeed the young Fred Baker was never a member of the CPUSA but was instead deeply involved with IWO activities. His early experiences in IWO cultural and political activities have had lasting power, just as might membership in the party. However, these experiences did not leave a scar they way they had for Harry Baker when he quit the CPUSA in disgust. They have instead been a source of warmth and inspiration throughout his entire life.
The fact that the IWO never required a blind loyalty to party line explains why membership was a much less wrenching experience for the tens of thousands of people who passed through its ranks than CPUSA membership. For most people the IWO provided the sense of community that various social movements of the 1960s and 70s provided. What was different about the IWO is that it was not a middle-class youth group, but a powerful working-class organization that united senior citizens and the very young in common action.
The IWO originated as a split from mutual aid society called the Workmen's Circle. Two garment workers, Harry Lasker and Sam Greenberg formed the Workmen's Circle in 1892 on the lower east side of New York in order to provide welfare and cultural benefits for an immigrant Jewish community. The most important benefit it provided was insurance. The Circle tried to make the adjustment to American life as smooth as possible for the vast migrations from the Pale and Eastern Europe during Czarist repression.
Many leaders of the Workmen's Circle belonged to the American Socialist Party. At the 1919 convention of the party, the more radical members of the group bolted and joined the recently formed Workers Party, the official Communist Party. By 1922 there was an official Jewish section of the Communist Party with its own daily newspaper called the Freiheit. Jewish members of the Socialist Party put out their own newspaper called the Daily Forward. Inside the Workmen's Circle the two blocs constantly fought.
In the late 1920s Communists everywhere received instructions from Moscow that a "left turn" was necessary since new revolutionary struggles were bound to break out. Organizationally, this meant that the CP's formed their own unions and mass organizations. It turned out that this call was premature and needlessly sectarian since there was no political upturn until a few years into the depression. Even then it made more sense for the CP to ally itself in united actions with socialists, no matter how resentful they were of the more moderate faction.
In some cases, however, the "left turn" was beneficial. The Communist Party launched the IWO and instead of becoming an isolated, sectarian rump formation in the immigrant Jewish community, it became a powerful social movement. On March 30, 1930 3,000 former members of the Workmen's Circle gave their backing to the new organization at a delegated convention in New York City. The membership came from the radical branches of the Workmen's circle that had heavy Communist representation. These branches had maintained an extensive educational and cultural program for a number of years and looked to the newspaper Freiheit for political guidance. The founding statement of the International Workers Order concluded with these
words:
"The International Workers Order is a fraternal organization. Its primary purpose is to insure its membership against sickness and death. In other words: the Order is an organization of mutual aid.
...But this is not the whole story. The International Workers Order is more than an insurance organization. It is part of the fighting front of the working class. It helps the workers not only to insure themselves for the emergency of sickness and death, but it helps them to improve their lives. It helps them to fight for a better living."
The IWO followed the CPUSA's initiative on most domestic and foreign policy questions. However, it would be a mistake to think that people only joined it for political reasons. There were reasons for its rapid growth in the 1930s that had nothing to do directly with politics. It was a mutual aid society that delivered solid benefits to its working- class base. People joined because they could get low cost insurance even if they worked in high-risk occupations. Garment workers who could easily lose a finger in a sewing-machine mishap had nobody else to turn to for insurance, other than the IWO.
In the most liberal sense of leftism, the IWO was the largest left formation in American history. At its peak, just before World War Two, it would contain among its friends and members celebrities such as Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, Rockwell Kent, Jimmy Durante, Irwin Corey and Zero Mostel.
The IWO's Jewish section placed a great emphasis on education. Classes in socialism or Jewish history were usually held at IWO lodges; other times they took place at classrooms at public schools that the organization rented on weekends. In New York City, Stuyvesant High School was used on a regular basis. The education continued during the summers. Two IWO summer camps in upstate New York, Camp Kinderland and Camp Lakeland, provided vacations for fifty- five thousand children over the years, including Fred Baker himself.
Politics, trade union activity and social life were tightly integrated in the Harry Baker household. The family consisted of Harry, his wife Freida, Fred and two sisters Esther and Rosalie. Esther was six years older than Fred and a dedicated Young Communist, while Rosalie was two years younger than him and less passionate about politics.
In their working-class neighborhood of Bathbeach, Brooklyn, the Bakers were among many other families with similar beliefs and associations. Most were of Jewish origin but there were many Italians as well. The Italians were also swept up by the great radicalism of the 1930s in great numbers, especially those who came from Sicily where socialist traditions were strong.
A typical evening at the Baker household would consist of the family discussing current events over a dinner prepared by Freida who had a well-deserved reputation as a "berrieh." "Berriehs" are women of remarkable energy, talent and competence. In Jewish households, there was no such thing as "just a housewife." Leo Rosten illustrates what it means to be a "berrieh" with a traditional Yiddish joke:
"The doctor examined the eighty-three-year-old woman and said, 'Some things not even modern medicine can cure...I can't make you any younger, you know.'
'Who asked you to make me younger?' retorted the berrieh. 'I want you to make me older.'
Harry Baker enforced a moral code in the household that his wife and children shared without question. Racist remarks were absolutely forbidden. In the unlikely event that Fred or his sisters uttered a word like "n-word" or "wop", they would get their face slapped on the spot. As the depression began to wind down with the arrival of war spending, Harry Baker's wages went up and he was able to afford a servant to help his wife out. She insisted that the household call her by her name "Cecilia" and not refer to her as the "girl," as many middle- class Jewish families referred to their black servants. That was disrespectful.
Harry Baker was also strict about what the family read. Tabloids like "The Daily News" were forbidden, as were comic books. He approved of the CPUSA newspaper, "The Daily Worker" and the left-liberal newspaper PM which had many party members on its staff.
An evening out might mean a trip over to the IWO lodge for a social event or a lecture. Lectures would be about important world events, such as the Spanish Civil War or some important American strike like-minded leftists were leading. After the lecture, the family would join other families in the cafeteria downstairs and have coffee and strudel and discuss the lecture. This was a remarkable social phenomenon prior to the days of television, consumerism and political apathy: dozens of politically engaged families gathering socially to discuss ideas and taking pleasure in this act.
While the heads of the household regarded questions of race and class to be deadly serious, this did not mean that the atmosphere at home was somber. All of the Bakers were sharp-witted and the dinner table would be an occasion for good-nature teasing. The most important source of pleasure for the family was music. Everybody could carry a tune and Esther and Fred in particular had beautiful singing voices.
The music that they loved crossed boundaries. They knew dozens of protest songs, but they were also in love with the Broadway musicals of the time. The 1930s was a time of tremendous creativity in the musical stage. Gershwin, Rogers and Hart, and Irving Berlin were all producing classic musicals that often appeared concurrently on Broadway. Esther took Fred to the theater to see a musical when he was in his early teens and he was swept away. He knew from that moment on that he wanted to act and sing.
Fred's first opportunity to perform publicly arrived when Esther organized the three Baker children to go out and rally support on the streets of Brooklyn for the "good fight." His sister Esther, thirteen years old at the time and a dedicated Young Communist League activist, recruited Rosalie and Fred to join her after school to rally support for the Spanish Republic. She wore a Young Communist League uniform, a gray jumper with red stripes, and would lead her two younger siblings in impromptu song recitals on sidewalks of their working-class Brooklyn neighborhood. The three gifted singers would launch into Spanish Civil War anthems and as a crowd gathered, they would start to sell the Daily Worker or raise money for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
Fred remembers the pleasure singing before these audiences gave him when he started out as a six-year-old. This was the start of a powerful political and artistic musical experience that was nourished by IWO and CPUSA summer camps. He also took part in a very important institution called People's Songs that expressed the deep affinity between the Popular Front and the more deeply-rooted tradition of folk singing in American society. It is out of this rich musical culture that the folk music revival of the 1950s arises. It is also where Fred developed the skills that would allow him to launch a career as an actor and a singer.
Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)