Part 3

However, there was another leader in the district by the name of Ed Leavitt, L-e-a-v-i-t-t, who was the organizational secretary, and Leavitt felt that it was improper to deal with me in that fashion, and he felt that since I was a young man at that time that I should be given an opportunity to prove my worth and prove myself. And he prevailed upon the district secretariat, namely, himself, Noral, and Lawrie, to assign me to section organizer in Bellingham. It wasn’t very long before I was banished from the district headquarters and sent to Bellingham to prove myself, which I think I did.

Mr. MOULDER. Were you then being compensated?

Mr. DENNETT. No, sir.

Mr. MOULDER. Or reimbursed for your travels?

Mr. DENNETT. I was not. We just bummed our way around.

Mr. MOULDER. Were you employed then?

Mr. DENNETT. I was unemployed. But we were just living as best we could, from hand to mouth.

I never was on the payroll of the Communist Party.

Mr. TAVENNER. I think you should define more specifically what was meant by the term “liquidate.”

Mr. DENNETT. Well, in that connection, I believe it occurred during a meeting of the district bureau, in which I had insisted that the grammar of one of Mr. Noral’s leaflets was in need of repair. He insisted that he knew what he was saying and that if anybody else didn’t know it was just too bad. And he proceeded to describe the importance of party discipline.

And in a very boastful way remarked that he was in the Fosterite faction that went to the Soviet Union in 1928 to the Sixth World Congress of the Comintern, and that following the decision of the Sixth World Congress to liquidate factionalism in the American section of the Communist Party, that the Comintern set up a special commission to deal with the American section delegates, dealing with the Foster faction, the Lovestone faction, and the Cannon faction. And he said that since he was in the Foster faction that they, being the largest faction, were called up first.

And when they were called before the commission the chairman of that commission was Josef Stalin, and that Stalin leaned over the rostrum, shook his finger at them, and demanded to know, “Do you or do you not submit to the authority of the Comintern and its decisions?”

Noral said that he very proudly was the first to arise and say that he did submit to it. And he gave that to us as an illustration of the kind of discipline that we must expect and that we must follow.

Mr. MOULDER. Mr. Dennett and Mr. Tavenner, would you like to have a recess at this time?

Mr. TAVENNER. Yes.

Mr. MOULDER. The committee will stand in recess for a period of 5 minutes.

(Whereupon a short recess was taken.)

Mr. MOULDER. The committee will be in order.

Proceed, Mr. Tavenner.

Mr. TAVENNER. Mr. Chairman, at this time I would like to call the witness, Mr. Jerry O’Connell.

Mr. Jerry O’Connell. Is he present?

(There was no response.)

Mr. TAVENNER. May I ask that he be called in the corridor?

Mr. MOULDER. Mr. Officer, would you call the witness Jerry O’Connell in the corridor?

Is there anyone here, an attorney representing the witness Mr. O’Connell?

(There was no response.)

Mr. MOULDER. Proceed, Mr. Tavenner.

Is there any announcement you wish to make on that, Mr. Tavenner?

Mr. VELDE. May I inquire of Mr. Tavenner or Mr. Wheeler, was Jerry O’Connell served with a subpena?

Mr. TAVENNER. Yes, sir; he was.

Mr. MOULDER. For appearance here today?

Mr. TAVENNER. Yes, sir.

Mr. VELDE. I think it would be appropriate at this point to have the subpena and the return thereon entered in the record.

Mr. TAVENNER. I would like to interrupt the course of this testimony and produce to the committee a copy of the subpena served on Mr. Jerry O’Connell, and call the committee’s attention to the return which shows that it was served at 12 minutes to 9 p. m., March 8, 1955, at his residence, 3415 Central Avenue, Great Falls, Mont., signed Harold Mady, chief of police.

I desire to offer the document in evidence and ask that it be marked as “O’Connell Exhibit No. 1,” for identification purposes only and to be made a part of the committee files.

Mr. MOULDER. It is so ordered.

Mr. TAVENNER. Mr. Dennett, you were asked a question by one of the members of the subcommittee with reference to your knowledge at the time you became a member of the Communist Party as to what control, if any, that a foreign power had, over the Communist Party in this country, and you explained that.

I would like to carry that point a little further at this time.

While you were a member of the Communist Party were you acquainted with an organization known as the Trade Union Unity League?

Mr. DENNETT. I was.

Mr. TAVENNER. Will you tell the committee, please, briefly, what that organization was?

Mr. DENNETT. Well, it was an effort on the part of the Communist leadership in this country to bring about the organization of unorganized workers. It had the idea that they should be organized in industrial unions. This is because its leader was William Z. Foster, and William Z. Foster had been an active leader in A. F. of L. unions. As a matter of fact, he was the leader of the great steel strike of 1919, and in the course of that strike he drew certain conclusions about the way it was conducted, namely, that it was next to impossible for the workers to obtain the kind of solidarity they needed to win when they were divided into so many different craft organizations.

So it was Foster who gave the greatest attention to this question of getting the maximum strength through organization of the workers in unions. And the Trade Union Unity League was an effort to organize these unorganized workers.

Now to the best of my knowledge some of the greatest success of the Trade Union Unity League occurred right here in the Northwest.

When I came into the district in 1932 there was a comparatively young fellow by the name of James Murphy who was the head of the Trade Union Unity League here. He was a lumberworker. He was a bona fide worker. He knew the language, he knew the habits, and he was able to get around the same as any “bindle stiff.”

For fear some might not understand the use of the term, in the old days loggers had to carry their own blankets when they went from place to place. And the way they carried them caused them to be called bindle stiffs.

These fellows were very adaptable. They were very skillful at traveling under adverse conditions, overcoming all kinds of physical difficulties. The stories of Paul Bunyon are not something out of the figment of the imagination entirely; they grew out of the huge efforts that the Northwest lumberworkers had to make in order to live.

So Murphy was a very successful organizer. He organized a very large number of people in the National Lumberworkers Union. He had an assistant by the name of Roy Brown who was almost equally successful. I do not recall the names of the others who were active in that organization, but I do know that they met with great success organizing miners here in the Northwest. They organized fishermen.

Mr. TAVENNER. What connection did those organizations have with the Trade Union Unity League?

Mr. DENNETT. They were all national unions in the Trade Union Unity League. And one of the greatest successful organizing drives was conducted among fishermen here in the Northwest.

A person who is now deceased, by the name of Emil Linden, was profoundly successful in organizing fishermen on the Columbia River and here in Puget Sound.

Mr. TAVENNER. Was he successful in the organization of groups affiliated with the Trade Union Unity League?

Mr. DENNETT. That is right.

The fishermen’s unions, as a matter of fact, had the distinction of having been organized and affiliated directly with the Red International of Labor Unions, which had a headquarters in Prague at that time.

Mr. TAVENNER. What do you mean by saying that the Trade Union Unity League was affiliated with or a part of the Red International of Labor Unions?

Mr. DENNETT. Well, they paid dues to an international organization, and this particular fishermen’s group which originated here were affiliated directly with the Red International of Labor Unions, and they paid dues directly to the headquarters in Prague.

Mr. TAVENNER. Did that make them virtually a part of the Red International of Labor Unions?

Mr. DENNETT. They were.

Mr. MOULDER. What period of time was that?

Mr. DENNETT. That was way back in about 1931 or 1932, or 1932 or 1933.

Mr. TAVENNER. Where was the seat of the headquarters of the Red International of Labor Unions?

Mr. DENNETT. At that time it was in Prague.

Mr. TAVENNER. Among the documents which you have turned over to the staff of the committee and which we have examined is one entitled “The Trade Union Unity League, Affiliated to the Red International of Labor Unions.”

Will you examine it and state whether or not you can identify it as one of the documents which you turned over to us?

(Document handed to the witness.)

Mr. DENNETT. If it has got my initials on it is mine; and it has.

Mr. TAVENNER. Will you return it, please?

Mr. Chairman, I think I should read into the record at this point several paragraphs which I see in this document.

Mr. MOULDER. Very well.

Mr. TAVENNER (reading):

The national center of the revolutionary industrial union movement in the United States is the Trade Union Unity League, organized in Cleveland, August 31, 1929. The TUUL coordinates and binds all the revolutionary union forces into one united organization. It leads and directs the general struggle of the new union movement. It is the American section of the Red International of Labor Unions.

Is that just what you have been telling us, Mr. Witness?

Mr. DENNETT. Correct.

Mr. TAVENNER. I desire to read again from page 35 of this document.

In the event of an imperialist war it will mobilize the workers to struggle against American imperialism and to transform this war into a class war against the capitalist system itself.

Do you recall that as one of the objectives of the Trade Union Unity League?

Mr. DENNETT. Yes, of course, I do. It is very plain. It is in black and white. I think that it has to be admitted by anyone with any knowledge of the subject that that was the objective, that was the policy. That goes back a long way. That goes back to Lenin’s teaching. It goes back to the teachings of Marx. In fact, it goes back to the teachings of almost any of the philosophers, the idea that when a given set of circumstances becomes impossible to withstand it is to be expected that somebody is going to break the bonds somewhere.

Mr. TAVENNER. I find this following paragraph on the same page under the title “Defend Soviet Union”:

The Trade Union Unity League especially organizes and educates the masses to fight in defense of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is the stronghold of the world’s working class. It is the cause of the workers in all countries. The overthrow of the Soviet Union by the capitalists would mean not only the slaughter of tens of thousands of Russian workers but would mark the beginning of the worst period of reaction internationally that the world has ever known. It would lead to widespread Fascist terrorism, and wholesale destruction of workers’ economic, political, and cultural organizations and the wiping out of conditions won by the workers through a century of sacrifice and struggle. It would throw back for decades the development of the world labor movement.

The workers must fight to the end in defense of the Soviet Union.

Is that paragraph in accord with what you understood at the time to be the objectives of the Trade Union Unity League?

Mr. DENNETT. Well, shortly after my induction into the Communist Party I, as recounted earlier this morning, became the district agitprop director. In that position at that time we had the special privilege of receiving the first issues of all new pamphlets or magazines or anything like that that were issued. At that time there came into my possession a document with the title “The 21 Conditions for Affiliation With the Communist International,” and among those conditions these points that are set forth in this document you have just read cover some of those conditions.

Mr. TAVENNER. In other words, was there a strict linking together through this organization and through the action of the Comintern, of the control of the Communist Party in this country by the international organization?

Mr. DENNETT. I think that has to be acknowledged by anyone who is familiar with the record at all.

However, there is one little addendum that should be inserted at this point, that at a later point in the history of the Communist Party in the United States--I believe it was about the time the Voorhis Act was passed--under the leadership of Earl Browder the Communist Party in the United States took steps by formal resolution adopted at convention to completely disassociate itself legally from any of this previous material. They attempted to satisfy and comply with the provisions of the Voorhis Act.

And in their effort to do so they adopted a resolution in which they repudiated all of this political statement and line that we are now talking about. That was a formal act.

Mr. TAVENNER. There was considerable testimony before this committee at the time it attempted to interrogate Max Granich and his wife, who were connected with a news facility which transmits from Europe to this country decisions of the Communist Party on an international level, and we heard a number of witnesses, including Louis Budenz, who was connected with the Daily Worker.

The testimony is very clear that that action you have spoken of was a device, not in good faith a severance or a disavowal of what had happened before. But it was a device, to keep the Communist Party from being liable under provisions of the Voorhis Act to which you have referred, of representing a foreign country.

Mr. DENNETT. Browder visited here in the Northwest during the time this action was being taken, and he explained it to our district bureau in this fashion, that the law was clearly aimed at putting the Communist Party out of business, and that the Communist Party was determined to not be put out of business, and it was going to comply with the act to the best of its ability, but that certainly did not mean that the Communist Party was going to disavow its sympathy with the working class throughout the world and the various sections of the Communist Party throughout the world.

There was great apprehension on the part of our district bureau about the action. We feared that perhaps the Communist Party was going nationalist on us, and we thought that was a heinous crime, that you should always be internationalists. And Browder was reassuring us that the Communist philosophy was still internationalist and would continue to be internationalist, but that the formal connection and the formal affiliations would have to be dispensed with.

He felt that the party was strong enough to travel along the road, as it needed to, without the direct intervention of the Comintern.

And, of course, it was shortly after that the Comintern itself was dissolved.

Mr. TAVENNER. How long did this organization, the Trade Union Unity League, remain in effect in this area? And when I say in effect, I mean in existence.

Mr. DENNETT. Until the organization of the CIO.

As the organization of the CIO approached or became clear that it was going to come in, the policy of the Red International of Labor Unions was modified by the international headquarters in Prague. It was modified because the 12th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International had reviewed the developing world situation, had noted with alarm the rise of fascism in Germany, and resolved that somewhere their policies were not being too effective and, therefore, they must make certain modifications and allow for a little more flexibility than they had before.

You must understand that one of the conditions which existed as a condition for organizing these Red trade unions was that those workers so organized were virtually obliged to declare their loyalty to the cause of the Communist Party. Now that did not mean that they had to be members of it, but it meant that they had to express their sympathy with the efforts of the Soviet people and they had to accept the idea that the objectives of the working class and of the Communist Party were the same.

Therefore, they didn’t meet with much success in the United States in organizing these Red trade unions because the average worker who was confronted with this choice would say, “The devil with you.” He wouldn’t make a choice of that kind.

Mr. TAVENNER. In other words, they realized they could not sell communism to the rank and file of American labor if it knew what they were buying.

Mr. DENNETT. They certainly couldn’t sell it under that label to the American worker. They rejected it.

Mr. TAVENNER. A label is for the purpose of describing an item; is it not?

Mr. DENNETT. I can accept your statement; I think you are right. I think that confirms our experience.

Mr. MOULDER. This was in a period, the conditions and circumstances of which offered a ripe opportunity for the exploitation of labor in this country by the Communist organizations.

Mr. DENNETT. That is very true. And you must understand that we met with an uneven success.

I have described to you that in the Northwest we did meet with great success among the lumber workers, among the miners, and among the fishermen. We did meet with great success there because a very large number of those workers originally had been with the Industrial Workers of the World. And they weren’t afraid of a Red label. Wherever you found workers who were not afraid of a Red label they could accept such organization in good faith. But in most of the industrial centers in the East except in places where desperation was at the breaking point they did not meet with success.

I am thinking now of the situation which obtained in the textile mills of Lowell, Lawrence, and Haverhill following the First World War. In those places the Industrial Workers of the World were successful in offering leadership to those workers. And it is true that in some parts of the South, contrary to the usual idea, in some parts of the South the Red leaders were quite successful in organizing.

I remember vividly the Gastonia strike, and that was completely Red leadership. There is no question about it. They were the only ones that had the tenacity to stay with it under such adverse circumstances. But they stayed with it and they met with great success. They organized thousands and thousands and thousands of workers.

Mr. TAVENNER. Would you say, generally speaking, the rank and file of labor would not accept the Communist Party if the Communist Party label were on it?

Mr. DENNETT. That is true. They wouldn’t accept even the red cards which were used.

It was a peculiar thing. It seemed as though it was a badge of honor to some people, but something of a shock and surprise to others that the membership cards very often were printed in a very deep red color in the various unions of the Trade Union Unity League. And, of course, some of the membership cards of the Communist Party at that time were in identically the same color. The only addition was the hammer and sickle was imposed upon it as well. And it would be a very easy matter to become mixed up or confused if you didn’t look carefully at some of those cards in that period of time.

But to complete the point that you are concerned with at this moment, it is true that the program as set forth by the Red International of Labor Unions did not meet with the uniform success which they hoped for in the United States. So in 1935--I believe it was in 1935, it may have been a little bit earlier than that--following the 12th Plenum of the Executive Committee of the Communist International’s decision that a sharp turn must be made in the mass work, that they must combat the rise of fascism by allowing greater flexibility to organize masses to resist the onrush of fascism, they took note of the situation in the United States and concluded that they could not prescribe the exact conditions under which to organize the workers in the United States.

That gave the opening which permitted the top leadership of the Communist Party in the United States to grant the request of most of the organizers in the Trade Union Unity League to dissolve their organizations and permit them to join the new rising organizations which were developing as industrial unions, and also to join the appropriate American Federation of Labor unions.

In other words, at the time of the split between the A. F. of L. and the CIO in the United States of America the Communist movement declared that it was logical and necessary to give up its own identity, which it did when it sacrificed the industrial unions that it had organized. And by 1935 they issued instructions that the industrial unions under the Trade Union Unity League must dissolve.

And I recall the regret which some of the fishermen had in having to give up their affiliation with the Red International of Labor Unions and go into what they call the “finky” organization, the International Seamen’s Union. They didn’t like it. They resented it. But nevertheless, as good soldiers, they obeyed the order. Later on it didn’t take them more than a couple of years when they were embarrassed whenever I would remind them that they had a Red origin. And the leadership there came to dislike me with a very firm resolve because I would never permit them to forget that they did have a Red origin and that I was ashamed of them being backward about taking progressive steps.

They caused me no end of concern because they were trying to be as conservative as the stanchest Republican when, in fact, they had a very, very Red origin.

Mr. TAVENNER. Mr. Dennett, would it be correct to analyze the situation you have described generally in this way: Beginning in 1935, and from then on, when the Red international of labor unions gave up the idea of having its own organizations within labor under its own label in this country, was the principal problem in dealing with the question of communism a matter of infiltration or attempted infiltration by the Communists into the leadership of all the unions in which they had a chance to gain leadership?

Mr. DENNETT. Well, I recognize that the term infiltration is used to imply generally that somebody did something with a secret purpose.

Now that may have been true. So far as my own knowledge is concerned, we took it in stride. We didn’t think that there was anything special about it. We declared our objective to be the organization of all the workers. And, of course, we were part of all the workers. And as long as we could maintain that philosophy we were satisfied that we were part of the organization.

Mr. TAVENNER. When you say part of the organization, what do you mean?

Mr. DENNETT. I mean that those members that were organized by the Communist Party in the Trade Union Unity League, when they gave up their identity as members of a Trade Union Unity League organization, such as the national lumberworker’s union or the fishermen’s union or the miner’s union or something of that kind, they had the opportunity to become members of the appropriate union which was organizing in that field. In the case of the Northwest it was at that time the woodworkers federation, which was organized, in part, under the leadership of the carpenters and joiners, but against the wishes of the top leadership of the carpenters and joiners.