Los Angeles, CA, USA - I waited a few months before writing anything about the significance of Dorothy Healey's death, who died at 91 late last year.
I guess you could say she was my mentor. When she died, a lot of people wrote about her because she had been chairwoman of the Southern California Communist Party USA and had a big influence on a generation of Los Angeles-based radicals.
Let me set the scene. In my late teens which was in the early '60s, I was a student at Los Angeles City College. I lived the typical poor student life, reading a lot of Dostoyevski in tiny dreary peeling green painted apartments in dank four-story brick apartments - places I'd now be afraid to go into for fear of their immediate collapsing. I guess I didn't dwell on such phenomena as earthquakes in those days. I worried only about the Revolution. I read not only Dostoyevksi but Mark Twain, Jack London, George Bernard Shaw, John Reed, Sinclair Lewis, Tolstoi and some others as well. I read lots of Bertolt Brecht. The world was alive to me with incredible, powerful voices and I wanted to become one of them.
Dorothy was my link to writers on the left. I met Al Richmond at her house, who as editor of the People's World had convinced Woodie Guthrie to write a column for him, for example. I met the writer Howard Fast later, not at her house, but he was at the time a member of the Communist Party and an ally of her's in intraparty wars.
I began trekking down to 84th Street, in the heart of what was then the Black ghetto, when I was 16, to talk politics, life and love with Dorothy. I don't know that I would be so impressed nowadays, but she was like an oracle to me. She was always ready to answer my most difficult questions with interesting, thought-provoking answers and ideas and information that seemed genuine and significant.
Further, there was something adventurous about driving into the ghetto, as well, for a Westside boy growing up in an urban Jewish intellectual home.
I visited Dorothy often enough that I met many fascinating people. I met people like her former husband Slim Connelly, who had been the West Coast president of the Newspaper Guild when Heywood Broun was president in New York.
Richmond was there often when I was there. Dorothy and Al were allies in the intraparty wars, so he spent a lot of time at her house. The first thing Richmond did when he showed up was sit down and start drinking. He was a hard drinking and a hard writing man. He did both well. There was nothing unique about newspapermen drinking in those days and it wasn't because he was a communist. Newspapermen hadn't cleaned up their acts like they have now, but they wrotea hell of a lot better. Maybe that was a good tradeoff, but I don't think so. Drunken genius makes for good reading. Ultimately, Richmond wrote A Long View From The Left: Memoirs of an American Revolutionary after he left the party.
I also got to know Alvah Bessie, one of the Hollywood Ten, who encouraged me in my writing more than anyone had to that point. I loved some of the reporters on the People's World.
Steve Murdock made beer in the hallway of his Berkeley home, where I sometimes stayed, and wrote about sports for a sports magazine that appreciated him enough not to care that he was writing about California politics for the People's World.
I was a member of the party for about five months, and one of my first duties was going around the state with other comrades selling the People's World. I'm sure that I was inspired to do this in part because Dorothy, in 1928, was arrested for making speeches and selling the Daily Worker on Oakland's waterfront as a new member of the young Communists.
I was also very mindful that it had only been a generation or two earlier that the "boy socialist" Jack London had been arrested in the same area for preaching socialism.
Two years later, Dorothy dropped out of school and helped organize a union and a strike at a cannery in San Jose. Her story after that is history - in the early '30s, she was organizing agricultural workers in the Imperial Valley. And in 1951, she went to prison for conspiring to advocate the violent overthrow of the United States government, although her conviction was later reversed.
It was exciting driving around selling People's Worlds. I remember in particular one time selling the People's World in front of the California Democratic Council convention in Fresno. The CDC was a grassroots Democratic Party organization that had a certain radical tone because so many of Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California cadre from the '30s had migrated there. The CDC was made up mostly of Roosevelt Democrats, a lot more conservative than the socialists who had supported Sinclair. But in Fresno I found out that all factions read the People's World because of Steve Murdock's coverage of the CDC. Reporters from the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle and other places knew and respected his coverage of progressive California politics. Neither the Los Angeles Times nor the San Francisco Chronicle had anyone as good as Murdock, and everyone knew it.
I also met some People's World reporters through Dorothy who became favorite friends of mine. Sam Kushner and John Kykiri, who was a Finn, both of whom would have been assets to the staff of many metropolitan newspapers. The only disappointment I had was that I never met Mike Gold, the People's World columnist who wrote a classic book of the '30s called Jews Without Money.
Eventually, Dorothy got me a job working for an organization called the Constitutional Liberties Information Center (CLIC). I reported directly to her and to Reuben Borough. Borough had been the editor of Upton Sinclair's EPIC News, which grew out of the author's EPIC campaign (End Poverty in California) at the bottom of the Depression. The election almost resulted in Sinclair being elected governor of California.
Dorothy also introduced me to a Communist I particularly wanted to meet. Herbert Aptheker was based in New York, but I met him while he was on tour in Los Angeles, then went to see him in New York.
In those days, Aptheker's books on American colonial and revolutionary history had been revelations for me. I had devoured Aptheker's books, and attended all his lectures in Los Angeles. I got to know the writings of W.E.B. DuBois through Aptheker. When I went to New York to see my mother, Aptheker and Dorothy arranged for me to stay with Sidney Finkelstein, the party's musical theoretician. He put me up in his home in Brooklyn.
Finkelstein wrote books on music that were quite brilliant. He made his living founding Vanguard Records, as the employee of the owner who knew Finkelstein had to work for cheap because he was a Communist. Finkelstein had exemplary tastes in classical and jazz, and he was Vanguard Records for a long time. Almost all the liner notes were his, even when they appeared under different names. He was also not so overbearing as Aptheker. He used to share a dinner with me of thick black bread and cheese and butter, and then we'd talk all night.
The reason I hesitated in plainly saying that Dorothy Healey was my mentor is that, as a horny young 16-year-old, there was an element of sexual attraction in my frequent trips to her home that suggested something other than her being my mentor. I think that Dorothy had that affect on many males. She was not a particularly beautiful woman, but she was not only pleasant to look at but also electrifying to talk to. She was a great teacher, and I'm sure that she would have been a great teacher into the mysteries of sex as well.
Dorothy was the head of the Southern
California District of the Communist Party from the late 1940s through the 1960s. She died in August of 2006 when she was 91 - and was no longer a Communist, although she still was a socialist.
It was not for nothing she was known in the press as "the Red Queen of Los Angeles." But like a lot of other Communists, she was shaken by Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev's secret speech about Stalin, and she quickly became an advocate of democratizing the party and making it more indepenenet of the Soviet Union. She became a critic of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and resigned from the party in 1973, still claiming to be a staunch Communist.
The last time I ran into Dorothy was at Skylight Books in the Los Feliz section of town, and somehow the passage of years, hers and mine, had tarnished the legend.
I no longer hung on her every word as I once had. You might even say that the magic was gone.
She didn't say anything I wouldn't have expected her to say. Still, Jack Smith in the Los Angeles Times could and did write a long and sympathetic portrayal of Dorothy, in part because she was persuasive and charming and even pretty and could be more easily portrayed in the pages of a "family newspaper" than Acosta could have.
My stay in the party was short and disillusioning. Although the American Communist Party had a distinguished part in American and California labor history - there would have been no CIO without it - it's probably a good thing it never gained actual political control.
That way it can maintain a more romantic hold in history. After all, while the good side in the Spanish Civil War had all the great songs, the fascists invariably took power. Had the other side kept power, perhaps we wouldn't look back at it with such nostalgia.
I admit that I was definitely one of the many '60s radicals who were deeply affected by Dorothy Healey. Los Angeles, after all, was the biggest center of party activity in the country after New York.
Of course, Dorothy ultimately left the party, and spent the last decades of her life in the company of Social Democrats rather than Communists. Her memoirs were published by Oxford University Press, because her history has been the history of California as well, especially her years during the Grapes of Wrath era in the Central Valley.
As I write this, I am less moved by the stirring books of yesteryear that so formed my being. I suppose that idealism always takes a back seat to a certain cynicism or even religiosity as one grows older. Maybe that is just the inevitable process of age at work/
Citizen Paine that first made me aware of American history, not the history they taught me in elementary school in the '50s, but real history.
Making meaning out of the world was my early obsession and I read everything that I could. And like a lot of others, I was very taken with Fast's novel Spartacus, which was eventually made into the 1960s era movie and a more contemporary movie of the same name.
Recently I began contemplating my experience with the party in light of nearly everyone's claim that capitalism has vanquished socialism forever. I'm not so convinced. I think that we are only a few years behind the Soviets in terms of a general collapse. The collapse might be, at first, more cultural and political than economic. This country's culture and politics have become so debased, it is hard to think that this is not intertwined with our economic travails as well.
The real genius of Huxley's Brave New World was that it so well predicted what would happen to the culture; it's happening now in our music, our books and our films. We may be the world's top gladiators at the moment, but that is a dubious recommendation from the country that once produced writers the likes of Mark Twain, Jack London, Sinclair Lewis, Upton Sinclair and John Steinbeck.
Some of Dorothy's colleagues, who turned against her after she left the party, were not the ones to lead a Revolution. I would not have wanted to see the name of socialism so discredited in this country, just as it has been discredited in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe by Communist parties there. That does not, however, validate the opposite, which is fascism.
Today I can see that the seeds of my love for and disillusionment with the Communist party came to me from Dorothy Healey. That's why it took me a while to write about her. People can dismiss her as nothing but an old bolshevik, if they want, and I suppose that's true, but she was both a good woman and a great woman of a type that we sorely could use in these grim days.
LIONEL ROLFE is author of The Uncommon Friendship of Yaltah Menuhin & Willa Cather and Literary LA and a Senior Contributing Editor to your World's Magazine.
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