Getting to know Commies

By Cynthia Grenier

“Commies: A Journey Through the Old Left, the New Left and the Leftover Left” by Ronald Radosh (Encounter Books) — fresh in bookstores — is an absolutely wonderful book: funny, moving, deeply sad. A book which anyone at all interested in the radical side of American life during the last half century should not miss.

Ronald Radosh considers himself to have been virtually born on the 1st of May, the great day of celebration for the left — above all, in the Soviet Union. Radosh has a photograph taken in 1939 of himself in a stroller, at a year and a half, about to be pushed down Fifth Avenue in the yearly Communist Party celebration that went through the garment center of the then-radical needle trade unions, ending with a mass rally at Union Square — for decades the historic center of radical protest.

His parents — father from Poland, mother from Russia — never actually joined the Party, but certainly were what could be called fellow travelers. Friends and relatives were Party members. An uncle died fighting in the Spanish Civil War. Radosh imbibed the ideas and sympathies of the left practically along with his mother’s milk.

Ironically, by the time of the Cold War, his father — because of his past activity with the Reds — found he was put on an industry blacklist. He then did , says Radosh, what many other blacklisted union activists close to the Communist Party did: he became a capitalist. He went into business with an old neighborhood friend whose cousin had owned one of the major hat firms in America. And, in a strange quirk of history, his pro-Communist father wound up getting the contract for the official Eisenhower hats in the 1952 campaign, which he designed and which were created in the factory he now owned.

Radosh and his parents moved from a Lower East Side apartment to Washington Heights, a new middle-class neighborhood, mainly inhabited by Eastern European Jewish immigrants and a new group of German Jews, like the parents of Henry Kissinger. His grade school, PS 173, was largely filled with Jewish students taught by Irish teachers who were largely conservative. When a student brought in a record of Paul Robeson as part of “Negro History Week,” the teacher, Agnes Driscoll, thrilled to the singer’s magnificent baritone until she asked who the singer was. Learning it was Robeson, she snatched the record from the player, screaming, “… that Communist in my class!” The student was sent to the principal’s office and suspended for a week.

Miss Driscoll had other occasion to find fault with her class on political grounds. At the time of the Dewey-Truman election, Radosh’s parents — and most of his classmates’ parents — were supporting the third-party candidacy of Henry Wallace, former vice president running on a pro-Soviet platform for the Progressive Party. So, naturally enough, at the time of a mock-election poll in school, Radosh and his classmates voted in good number for Wallace. Miss Driscoll exploded, Wallace in her eyes was a Red and a traitor. “In our classroom we could only vote for Dewey or Truman. She went on to inform us that if any of our parents were intending to vote for Wallace, we should tell them they could not and should not.” Little Ronald ran home crying.

Radosh went to high school at the Elizabeth Irwin High School, an affiliate of New York’s famous Little Red Schoolhouse, spending every summer in the Catskills at “Commie” summer camps. Entering the University of Wisconsin in the late 1950s, he became pretty much one of the founding fathers of the New Left and stayed center stage through the ’60s.

Radosh’s long road to Damascus really began when he decided (along with co-author Joyce Milton) to write a book testifying to the innocence of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, executed as Soviet spies. As a youth, he had stood vigil the night they were put to death. Imagine his surprise as he studied the government documents and all the material on the trials to find out they were, in fact, guilty. The resulting book, “The Rosenberg File,” created a sensation. The authors went on Nightline, took part in debates, while erstwhile leftish friends ripped the book to shreds in hostile reviews. Radosh found what it was like to be blacklisted himself. University professorships were refused him. The academic left closed its doors to him.

Radosh soldiered on through the wars in Central America, the Contras and the Sandanistas — experiences that only firmed his lack of spirit for the left. A visit to Cuba in 1992 really shut the door for him: Cuba had from his student days always been a kind of Communist ideal. But finally seeing the “paradise” that Castro had built for the Cuban people tore it from him.

Visiting a Cuban mental health hospital, he and others in his group were struck by how zombie-like the patients appeared. When they asked the doctor whether the patients were heavily sedated, he replied, “Lobotomy did wonders for her condition”, and, “We are proud that in our institution, we have a larger proportion of hospital inmates who have been lobotomized than any other mental hospital in the world.” When one member loudly objected, he was silenced by a Castro supporter, “We have to understand that there are differences between capitalist lobotomies and socialist lobotomies.”

“Commies” is quite a book. Vivid, funny, lots of left-leaning celebs for color and, yet, deeply touching. Go buy it. You won’t regret it.

Cynthia Grenier

Cynthia Grenier, an international film and theater critic, is the former Life editor of the Washington Times and acted as senior editor at The World & I, a national monthly magazine, for six years. Read more of Cynthia Grenier's articles here.