(2 of 2)
Convinced at last that the village was full of Government agents, they hurriedly prepared to disband. Taxis called for them. The last group was to burn all documents. But General Secretary Ruthenberg furtively buried them in a barrel in plain sight of a Federal undercover agent, lingered theatrically to let himself be arrested. Earlier, serving a 5-10 year sentence with Gitlow in Sing Sing, Comrade Ruthenberg had amazed fellow-convicts with a Romeo and Juliet exhibition as he wooed a female comrade "with all the ardor of an impetuous lover."
>One day Acting Secretary Earl Browder was tipped off by his caucus spy that Israel Amter, one floor above, was cooking up a double-crossing caucus bulletin. Bounding up the stairs, Browder rushed at Amter, seized a corner of the sheet, panted his command to give it up. Comrade Amter said it was none of Comrade Browder's business. Browder, bloodshot with importance, turned to Gitlow: "As a member of the Central Executive Committee, I, the secretary of the Party, order you to direct Comrade Amter to turn the paper he has in his hand over to me." Replied Comrade Gitlow lazily: "If what Amter has in his hand is a caucus document and you want it, please turn over all of your caucus documents first." Browder departed with dire growls. Gitlow, who prided himself on his superior spy service, smiled maliciously.
By no means all Author Gitlow's reminiscences are as amusing. Sophisticated readers may find entertainment in his spirited accounts of the ceaseless factional fights which turned the Party into a Muscovite Tammany, with slander, snooping, blackmail, character assassination, double-dealing, backstairs intrigue, horse-trading, spying, sabotage, as chief weapons in the struggle to win Utopia for the masses.
Gitlow tells how the Communists raised Party funds through defense campaigns for Sacco & Vanzetti, the Scottsboro boys, starving British miners; how they hushed up the fiasco of the $250,000 "gold bonds" which were sold to finish building a $3,000,000 co-operative apartment house in The Bronx. (Though sometimes it worked the other way, as when a Lett comrade, entrusted with $50,000 for the U. S. Party, used the money to set himself up in business in Chicago.) Highlights are his accounts of how Communists organized the Federated Farmer-Labor Party in 1923 to back La Follette for President, wrecked it on orders from Moscow; of how Communists used gangsters in the Furriers strike of 1926; of Communists in the needle trades (Gitlow in charge), of the Anthracite strike which Foster sabotaged (says Gitlow) in order to put his factional enemies on the spot in Moscow.
In the same class are his revelations of how Communists broke up meetings of Socialists, liberals. A particularly good example was a meeting at Manhattan's Town Hall, broken up by Communist hooligans because Roger Baldwin called attention to Russia's political prisoners. Roger Baldwin's American Civil Liberties Union later persuaded Governor Al Smith to pardon Author Gitlow from Sing Sing, while Gitlow's own comrades, busy organizing the International Labor Defense, did nothing. In fact the opposing faction considered it a stroke of luck to have Gitlow out of the way.