Foundation of Communism

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 . . . Com- 
munist morality is identical with the fight to strengthen the dictator- 
ship of the proletariat."

"We must be ready to employ trickery, deceit, lawbreaking, with- 
holding 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 par- 
doned 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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