Ben Gitlow American Communist

Benjamin "Ben" Gitlow (1891 - 1965) was a prominent American 

socialist politician of the early twentieth century and a founding member of the Communist Party USA. From the end of the 1930s, Gitlow turned to conservatism and wrote two sensational exposés of American Communism, books which were very influential during the McCarthy period. Gitlow remained a leading anticommunist up to the time of his death.

Our civilization is in peril because so many eager and uncritical minds, beguiled by the communist ideal, instead of being trained in virtue, are trained to renounce all moral standards in the service of their ideal. Those consecrating themselves to communism must not only cast out truth, mercy, justice, and personal honor, but undergo a sickening discipline in lies, cruelty, crime, and self-abasement. They must endorse such "Leninist" maxims as these:

"We do not believe in external principles of morality . . . Communist morality is identical with the fight to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat."

"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, withholding and concealing truth."

"We can and must write . . . in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, scorn and the like toward those of differing opinion."

This doctrine of immorality on principle, invented by Marx, brought into focus by Lenin, and carried into limitless action by 
Stalin, is playing a major role in the disintegration of our Graeco-Christian civilization. Many who go in for communism in a mood of high-minded revolt against lesser evils come to a point where they realize this fact and apprehend its consequences with horror. But by that time they are consecrated; they are fixed firm. Their whole life-pattern--daily bread and daily nutriment of esteem--is conditioned upon their staying firm. They lack the force of character, the clarity of mind, the self-reliance, the pure and sheer daring, to back out and be called a renegade. 

This doctrine of immorality on principle, invented by Marx, brought into focus by Lenin, and carried into limitless action by Stalin, is playing a major role in the disintegration of our Graeco- Christian civilization. Many who go in for communism in a mood of high-minded revolt against lesser evils come to a point where they realize this fact and apprehend its consequences with horror. But by that time they are consecrated; they are fixed firm. Their whole life-pattern--daily bread and daily nutriment of esteem--is conditioned upon their staying firm. They lack the force of character, the clarity of mind, the self-reliance, the pure and sheer daring, to back out and be called a renegade.

That is what Ben Gitlow did. He was no literary sympathizer changing his view on the sidelines. He was the most devoted com- 
munist in the United States--his devotion proven, at least, by the severest test--and he backed out from the inmost positions of power.

From infancy Gitlow had breathed in the idea that if a workers' state took over the industries and operated them without paying profits to capital, there would be no more poverty or injustice in the world. His father, driven out of Russia by the Czar's police, earned his living in a shirt factory in New York, but worked in a little socialist print shop on the side. His mother too was a worker--a mirthful and much loved worker--for socialism. Ben was a regular American boy, good at baseball, better at the shot-put, still better at football, and continually elected president of his class. But he read more highbrow books than the other boys, and he joined the Socialist Party at sixteen as a mere matter of course.

After completing three years of high school, he took jobs in factories and department stores in order to help his brother through medical college. His real career, however, was in the Socialist Party as orator and organizer. He became the first president of the first department store workers union in America, losing a good job in the process. And by the time the Bolshevik Revolution occurred in Russia he was a socialist member from the Bronx of the New York State Legislature.

He believed that the day which he had awaited almost from the 

cradle was about to dawn. His socialism had always been of the militant type, more concerned with labor action than the pious dreams of the reformists. And his first thought now was to join the "left wingen" in organizing an American Communist Party. His lifelong conviction and cool courage gave him a leading role in this hazardous undertaking--gave him the prickly distinction, also, of being the first man arrested in the United States for advocating communism.

His trial occurred in 1919 in the midst of the famous "red raids" of Attorney General Palmer. Clarence Darrow undertook to get him off by hushing the implications of the subversive things he had said. But Gitlow would have nothing to do with that. He was a revolution- ist, and he insisted that Darrow defend him on the sole ground of the "right of revolution." It was a day of joy for the extreme reds when Gitlow stood up to receive sentence. Instead of mitigating his crime. He redoubled it by denouncing the United States Government as a capitalist dictatorship," calling for its overthrow, and demanding the inauguration in its place of a "dictatorship of the proletariat." For this act of daring, he received from the court the maximum sentence of five to ten years at hard labor, and from his party comrades the crown of perfect martyrdom. No other communist career in the United States opened so brilliantly or contained such promise. The Moscow Soviet elected him an honorary member, and the Soviet government tried to secure his release by offering in arrested American,  known to history as Kirkpatrick, in exchange.

After serving three years in Sing Sing Prison, Gitlow was pardoned by the "capitalist dictatorship"--pardoned, to be slightly more exact, by Governor Al Smith--and went back to his task of organizing the dictatorship of the proletariat. In the succeeding years he occupied every important post in the American Communist Party.: editor-in-chief of its paper, member of its Political Committee, member of its 

Secretariat of Three, General Secretary of the Party, director of its strike and trade union policy, secret leader of the Passaic textile workers strike, the biggest communist strike in our history, and twice the communist candidate for Vice President. He made his first trip to Moscow in 1927 at the special request of the Kremlin. An extended conversation with Stalin on the problems of the American movement ensured him the highest advancement. He became a member of the 
executive committee both of the Red Trade Union International and the Communist International, and within the latter was elected to the Praesidium, the inside ruling group of the world communist move. ment.

He was, in short, a top communist leader, and every road to prestige and power in the life he had chosen was open before him. He had only to stifle a growing doubt in his mind as to whether this power that tasted so sweet was really leading to the liberation of the proletariat--as to whether, indeed, a party dictatorship could ever lead to the liberation of anybody. He had accepted Lenin's one-party system as a temporary expedient because Russia, while laying the foundations of socialism, was surrounded by a hostile world. No one foresaw that Stalin would one day announce in the same breath the "complete victory of socialism" and the permanence of the one-party system. But Gitlow at least had premonitions. From the first he found it hard to believe that this overbearing military discipline of the members of a small party was the one and only road to the millennium. 

Life seemed to him too complex, the world "much too large," as he says,for this single and simple solution of a problem involving the whole of mankind.

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