from a Red of the 30s
It has since been calculated, quite believably, that of twenty-one staff members and frequent contributors to the magazine when I was there, eleven have become “enemies of the people,” or the equivalent in party invective; one was killed in Spain, a gentle and dedicated youth named Arnold Ried; and seven couldn’t be tracked down. Only two were still faithful, or hooked, in the postwar era. I started to turn “enemy of the people” in my second or third month of the New Masses, for reasons I will come to in a moment, achieved the distinction of being attacked by name in the Daily Worker while still on the magazine, and was out in the bourgeois cold ten months later, in the spring of 1937. […]
In the second or third month of my tenure the Moscow Trials Trials took their initial toll, leaving me, among millions of others, aghast and bewildered. Unable to understand how men like Zinoviec and Kamenev, who I had just gotten around to learn were heroes of the Russian Revolution, were really “cannibals” and “mad dog assassins” in ideological disguise, I went to Joe Freeman, the editor who had hired me and a warm, sympathetic, and eloquent man if ever there was one. I could understand, I said, how a few of the dozens of accused heroes might be “cannibals” of sorts, but I couldn’t begin to see why at least one or two of them didn’t stand up and say, “It’s a lie, I didn’t do it” even if they had, or “Yes, I did it because I thought it was the right thing to do.” Why did they all grovel and damn themselves and beg to be shot as a service to the Socialist Fatherland and a boon beyond their poor deserts?” “You have to read Dostoevsky,” Joe advised me, “to understand the Russian soul.” So when word came from Moscow a month or so later of a second batch of trials, at which Piatakov, Redek, and others were to be charged with operating an “Anti-Soviet Trotskyite Terrorist Centre,” I impiously captioned our editorial comment “Dostevsky Rides Again,” knowing I could change it when the proof came back from the printer.
A special editorial meeting followed, at which it was made plain to me that such frivolity was roughly equivalent to tripping up a bishop at High Mass. Nor was my status improved when I pinned up over my desk a cartoon from the Daily Worker which depicted Trotsky as the usual mad dog, with bulging eyes and dripping fangs, crounched and ready to spring at his innocent victim. The caption over this horror merely said, “Thoroughly Discredited,” an understatement that stuck me as so droll that I had to be warned again about the consequences of misplaced levity.
[…]
Schachtman and his supporters broke away on the Finnish question, but by this time the Trotsky followers had already suffered the numerous divisions that come inevitably to amoebas and minority political parties alike. First a faction headed by Comrades Ohler and Stamm went its way, soon to separate again into Ohlerites and Stammites. Somewhere along the way the immediate family of one George Marln left to become Marlenites, and a Mr. and Ms. Wisbord had a League for the Class Struggle all to themselves until divorce separated their rank from their file. The Fieldites, another group of limited range, were said to have come a cropper when picket signs were borne past their headquarters proclaiming: “Mr. and Mrs. Field are No Longer Fieldites.” The deadly seriousness with which all this fantasy could be taken by its dreamers was illustrated at the stormy climax of the evening, so the story goes, Cannon stepped to the rostrum, leveled a finger at his rival, and issued the memorable warning: “Very well, Comrade Schachtman, we will seize power without you!”
–Â Robert Bendiner, Just Around the Corner, 97-100, published 1967