The Life of the Party

13.

I loved being in the party at first. I loved the powerful sense of identity it gave me, something I never had before. I loved the sense of purpose, of being part of something larger than myself. I even loved what most people hated about the PLP, it’s dogged (and dogmatic) certainty that it, and no other entity, was right.
Our party club in the San Francisco schools had a dynamic leader in Kathy O’hara. Big boned, a little dumpy, stringy hair, she exuded a confidence that I could only marvel at. She had charisma. The club met weekly. We usually discussed some theory, out of Lenin’s “The State and Revolution,” or, increasingly, out of PL magazine. It had been about 2 years since “The “Road to Revolution III” had come out, a seminal screed that severed the party’s relationship with China and attacked the nationalism of every other “revisionist” so called “communist” party in the world. We (and our miniscule allied parties in Mexico, Canada, and Great Britain) alone were the keepers of the flame.

Yet we attracted some incredibly smart people, including I learned by the grapevine a guy I knew at Exeter who won all the smarts awards and got involved at Harvard (probably never joined the party). Despite the persistence of sectarianism and dogmatism, which most of us squirmed at from time to time, the party had two things going for it. One was it’s insistence on organizing the working class. The party chairman, Milt Rosen, had written a pamphlet called “Build a Base in the Working Class.” It wisely counseled comrades to make enduring friendships with working class people. The second thing was its commitment to “smashing” racism. The party understood that racism was the primary obstacle to the working class unity that would have to develop if a revolutionary movement were to succeed. While masses of blacks did not flock to the party – our teacher’s club was all white – the party as a whole was reasonably well integrated for that time when Black Nationalism – which the party both courageously and foolishly attacked – was on the rise.

As a new party member, my job was to organize a march to Sacramento with the Organization of Unemployed Teachers (OUT). I managed to destroy the group. I was the one proposing the march, under the auspices of the Committee for Jobs in the Public Schools. We got the California Teachers Association to sponsor 3 busses, but were barely able to fill one. We had about 30 people. Wilson Riles, the black, progressive Superintendent of Public Instruction was going to speak. My friend Barbara, an ex-PLPer, was to answer him. I got to be the last speaker, a position I have always favored.

Riles made a good speech, decrying the lack of funding for public schools, ironic now, considering how far the support for public schools has fallen in California since 1971. Barbara attacked the speech, essentially arguing that it was Riles fault for not fighting hard enough for more funding. Riles returned to the mike as said “If you think Wilson Riles is the enemy, you are seriously deluded.”

Then I made my speech. I had “vetted” it to one of the “center forces” on the bus, a woman leader of OUT. She said it sounded like an ego trip to her. “Okay,” I said, “but do you object to my giving it?”

“No,” she said.

My speech went something like: “My name is Henry Hitz, and I’m a member of the Progressive Labor Party, a Communist Party. We believe that there will be sufficient jobs for teachers and that schools will only start to improve once we have have a working class revolution!”

The speech was greeted by groans, and the founder of OUT, a nice enough middle class fellow, turned off the microphone on me.

I thought that’s what party members did, called for revolution at every opportunity. Indeed, there was a section of the party that believed this, but not the West Coast leadership. The OUT leadership attacked me, and the PLP leadership attacked me. This was the first time I noticed that here were simmering disagreements about how PLP worked in “united front” organizations, disagreements, which, years later, would erupt into a full-blown split in the party. As for OUT, even though I apologized profusely at the post-mortem meeting regarding the march, it never met again.

I had better luck organizing the Substitute Caucus, which along with the Teachers Action Caucus, worked in the local AFT chapter to overthrow the “sell-out” union leadership. This effort was fairly sophisticated: there was even a club of “underground” party members who because they weren’t publicly identified with the party, were able to reach out more effectively to the center. In the union elections, I was set to run for substitute representative when I got a call from a party muckymuck in New York asking me to instead make sure the vote count was honest. I was disappointed, but I carried out my assignment dutifully. My comrade Lena, a dark-haired beauty I had my eye on, ran instead. Astonishingly, the combined caucuses won 4 seats on the 12 member executive board of the union.

Meanwhile, life on the home front grew increasingly contentious. The word I coined at the time do describe my life was “hecticism.” I felt like I was trying to serve two masters, the party and my wife. The party required of me at least 3 meetings a week: a club meeting, a caucus meeting, a union meeting. And, I needed to spend at least one weekend morning standing in front of this or that supermarket hawking my quota of 20 Challenges, The Communist Paper. Ten cents. Written in this pseudo working class argot that I found alternately annoying and endearing: “The bosses quaked in their boots as 25 members of the PLP picketed U. S. Steel demanding 30 hours work for 40 hours pay…”

For every meeting I went to, Sasha required that I serve an evening of child care. Plus I had to do half the cooking, cleaning, and housekeeping. All this so Sasha could write. She had quit her job to write full time, a decision I both respected and resented. I wished I had the same luxury, as I had never given up my desire to write, and yet I secretly regarded this ambition in both her and me as “bourgeois.” Wasn’t there a revolution to fight?

Our new daughter Zena, born in May 1973, enabled us to paper over our differences. She came into our unwieldy alliance, and seemed to realize right away that if she was going to keep the family together, she had to be perfect. She was a perfect baby, sleeping through the night after the first month, infinitely cute as she took her first baby steps and babbled her first words. I didn’t understand then as I do now how much of “cuteness” is a survival strategy. With her dark Frida Kahlo eyebrows, she looked more like Sasha than Sasha herself, one of Sasha’s friends used to joke. Zena did a yeoman’s job of keeping the family together in the tumultuous first year of her life. More than that, no one could have done.