alifornia e California Red CALIFORNIA RED A Life in the American Communist Party Dorothy Ray Healey and Maurice Isserman UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS Urbana and Chicago Illini Books edition, 1993 © 1990 by Oxford University Press, Inc., under the title Dorothy Healey Remembers: A Life in the American Communist Party Reprinted by arrangement with Oxford University Press, Inc., New York, New York Manufactured in the United States of America P54321 This book is printed on acidjree paper. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Healey, Dorothy. California Red : a life in the American Communist Party I Dorothy Ray Healey, Maurice Isserman. p. em. Originally published: Dorothy Healey remembers: a life in the American Communist Party: New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Includes index. ISBN 0-252-06278-7 (pbk.) 1. Healey, Dorothy. 2. Communists-United States-Biography. I. Isserman, Maurice. II. Title. HX84.H43A3 1993 324.273'75'092-dc20 [B] 92-38430 CIP For Dorothy's mother, Barbara Nestor and for her son, Richard Healey And for Maurice's uncle, Abraham Isserman ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This work is based substantially on a series of interviews conducted by the UCLA Oral History Program from 1972 to 1974. These interviews appear in a three-volume work titled Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us(© 1982 The Regents of The University of California. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission). Less formally, let me say that I am grateful to Joel Gardner, whom I never met but whose skillful interviewing of Dorothy for Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us inspired this work and saved me endless hours of duplicated effort a decade later, and to Dale E. Treleven, director of the UCLA Oral History Program, who gave me permission to draw freely upon the material in Tradition's Chains Have Bound Us, and who offered helpful suggestions and expressions of support throughout this project. John Ahouse, curator of the Dorothy Ray Healey collection in the library archives at California State University, Long Beach, and his assistant Irene Still went out of their way to make my visit there productive. The Healey collection was obviously invaluable to this project; the w,ooo-plus books, pamphlets, magazines, broadsides, letters, and other items it contains will be of interest to anyone researching U.S. radicalism or Southern California politics in the 1930S- 196os. In addition to books and articles cited as the source of excerpts in the text of this book, the following published sources were useful to me: Victor B. Nelson-Cisneros, "UCAPAWA and Chicanos in California: The Farm Worker Period, 1937-1940," Aztlan, VII (Fall of 1976); DevraAnne Weber, "The Or­ ganizing of Mexicano Agricultural Workers: Imperial Valley and Los Angeles, 1928-34: An Oral History Approach," Aztlan, III (Summer 1972); Cletus E. Daniel, Bitter Harvest: A History of California Farmworkers, 1870-1!)41 (1981); and Vicki Ruiz, Cannery Women, Cannery Lives: Mexican Women, Unionization and the California Food Processing Industry, 1!)]0-1!)50 (1987). Michael Furmanovsky allowed me to read some of the unpublished chapters of his dissertation on the Communist Party in Los Angeles and also had sug­ gestions to make on research possibilities. I also found it helpful to read Leonard Joseph Leader's unpublished dissertation "Los Angeles and the Great Depres­ sion" (UCLA r 97 2). Sherna Berger Gluck, Director of the Oral History program at California State University, Long Beach, sent me copies of the transcripts of oral interviews with Dorothy Healey's mother, Barbara Nestor. She also shared her knowledge of oral history theory and bibliography with this newcomer to vii the field, as did Michael Frisch of the History Department of the University of Buffalo. Eve Goldberg sent me a copy of her excellent film documentary "Dor­ othy Healey: American Red." I'm grateful to all the people who shared their memories of Dorothy with me: Bettina Aptheker, Jim Berland, Jack Berman, Ben Dobbs, Elizabeth Eudey, Edward and Marta Goldstucker, Richard Healey, Ellenore Hittelman, Paul Jarrico, Phil Kirby, Terry Kupers, Ben Margolis, John McTernan, Carol Jean Newman, Jack and Tillie Olsen, Al Richmond, Ethel Shapiro-Bertolini, Delfino Varela, and Donna and Frank Wilkinson. (Regrettably, Al Richmond and Jack Olsen both died before this book could be published). The Smith College Committee on Faculty Compensation and Development provided the funding that made possible my two research trips to California. Susan Rabiner shepherded this project through the early editorial stages at Ox­ ford University Press; when she left Oxford for other employment, Valerie Aubry ably and enthusiastically took her place. Marcia Williams, to whom I have the good fortune of being married, transcribed the tapes of my interviews with Dorothy Healey-a task for which, I hasten to add, she was generously compensated by Oxford. (Would that all my debts to her were so easily repaid). Ashfield, Massachusetts M.I. Vlll California Red INTRODUCTION Dorothy Ray Healey joined the Young Communist League (YCL) as a teenager in Berkeley, California, in 1928. She was to remain a member of the Communist movement in California for the next forty-five years, an era which spanned the most important events in the history of American Communism. She rose to a position of leadership within the Party that was rare for a woman and particu­ larly unusual given her increasingly critical views of the movement's dogma, practice, and allegiances. In the 1930s Dorothy was a farm and cannery union organizer in the fierce California labor struggles immortalized in John Stein­ beck's novels In Dubious Battle and The Grapes of Wrath; in the 1940s she became county organizer of the Los Angeles Communist Party, an organization whose membership and influence within the American Communist movement were second only to that of the Party in New York City; in the 1950s she was indicted and convicted under the Smith Act, a conviction ultimately overturned by a Supreme Court decision; in the 196os she was an active participant in civil rights, civil liberties, and antiwar protests, and in the process became mentor and confidant to a new generation of young radicals including such figures as Angela Davis. In many ways Dorothy exemplified the aspirations, commitment, illu­ sions-and, ultimately, disillusionment-of a generation of young Communists who joined the movement just before and during the Great Depression, expe­ rienced the exhilaration of the Party's growing power and influence during the Popular Front era of the 1930s and the Grand Alliance era of the Second World War, and then watched in dismay as the Party was reduced to a remnant of its former strength through the battering it received in the McCarthy era and through its own sectarian mistakes. But Dorothy differed from most of her contemporaries within the Party because she chose to remain in it long after they had departed. The most significant turning point in her long political career came with the Communist movement's de-Stalinization crisis of 1956-1958, during which she emerged as one of the leading apostles of political unorthodoxy within the Communist Party. Fully three-quarters of the Communist Party membership, people who had stuck with the movement through the worst of McCarthyism, chose to leave in that two-year period, disgusted with the Party's apologies for the crimes of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union and despairing of the Communist movement's prospects in the Uniteq States. Dorothy chose to stay. And for the better part of the next two decades she found herself in constant conflict with the New York-based national leaders of the Party for whom the 3 authority of the Soviet Union remained inviolate-it was in good measure through her influence that the Communist Party in California came to be re­ ferred to in those years as the "Yugoslavia" of the American Communist move­ ment. Whatever one thinks about her decision to remain in the Party through the 196os and into the early 197os, it did give her a unique vantage point from which to observe an era in the history of American Communism that has been little studied or understood. Why she stayed, what she hoped to accomplish, what lessons she drew from her own and the Party's past achievements and failures, and why she finally decided to leave, are questions which the chapters that follow will attempt to answer. Dorothy's life story illuminates some of the central issues in the continuing historical debate over the character of the Communist movement in the United States. During the cold war a consensus emerged among the leading historians of the movement that regarded the question of Soviet control as the key to understanding the evolution of American Communism. Theodore Draper gave this interpretation its classic statement in his 1957 book The Roots of American Communism: The periodic rediscovery of "Americanization" by the American Commu­ nists has only superficially represented a more independent policy. It has been in reality merely another type of American response to a Russian stimulus. A Russian initiative has always effectively begun and ended it. For this reason, "Americanized" American Communism has been sporadic, superficial, and short-lived. It has corresponded to the fluctuations of Rus­ sian policy; it has not obeyed a compelling need within the American Com­ munists themselves. In the course of the 1970s and 198os a new generation of historians, many of whose political inclinations had been shaped by the upheavals of 196os, chal­ lenged this consensus in such works as Mark Naison's Communists in Harlem During the Depression, Ellen Schrecker's No Ivory Tower, Bruce Nelson's Workers on the Wateifront, Nell Painter's The Narrative ofHosea Hudson, and Steve Nelson, James Barrett, and Rob Ruck's Steve Nelson, American Radical (the last two works representing collaborations between veterans of the Communist movement and younger, non-Communist historians).