Fred Beal
Fred Erwin Beal was an American labor-union organizer whose critical reflections on his work and travel in the Soviet Union divided left-wing and liberal opinion. In 1929 he had been a cause célèbre when, in Gastonia, North Carolina, he was convicted in an irregular trial of conspiracy in the strike-related killing of a local police chief. But having escaped to the Soviet Union, his decision in 1933 to return and bear witness to the costs of Stalin's collectivist policies, including famine in Ukraine, was disparaged and resisted by many of his erstwhile supporters.
The New York Times remained committed to what it has since acknowledged was the "tendentious" reporting of Soviet achievements by its Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty. It was left first to Forverts, the Yiddish-language version of a New York socialist daily, and then, nationwide, to the right-wing Hearst Press to publish Beal's accounts.
In his later memoirs, Beal's disillusion with communism extended to his experience as a labor organizer with the Communist Party in the United States and with what he concluded had been the party's calculated sacrifice of his, and his co-defendants', interests in their Gastonia trial.
To the Soviet Union and back
When Beal decided to skip the appeal of his Gastonia trial conviction, and travel to Russia he was following his co-defendant and Communist Party comrade, Clarence Miller. Both men had been facing seventeen to twenty years hard labor in the Raleigh penitentiary. In Moscow, their paths parted. Beal was sent away on a propaganda tour of Central Asia. Then in 1931, after being persuaded by the American party leaders to end an undercover return to the United States, to a new large-scale tractor plant in Kharkiv. This was a project hailed by Stalin as "a steel bastion of the collectivization of agriculture in the Ukraine".Meanwhile, Beal describes Miller, "who was never a worker", as "blossoming out" in Moscow as a "Red professor" with a comfortable apartment. From his vantage in Kharkiv, Beal wrote, "I could not, like Clarence Miller and so many other complaisant dream-walkers, convince myself that the suffering and futility which I saw everywhere in Stalin-land were but figments of the Capitalist imagination."
At the Kharkiv Tractor Plant, Beal directed "Propaganda and Cultural Affairs" for a colony of several hundred foreign workers and specialists. Under his name, Moscow published a Pictorial Survey of their contribution to "socialist construction". In this, Beal admitted only to the voluntary renunciation of "luxuries". Later, he was to give a very different account. The colony suffered acute shortages of food and fuel, but was "divided by a chasm from the ten thousand Russian workers employed". To protest their conditions, these workers resorted to the only weapon open to them, "silent sabotage". Meanwhile, at the factory gates there was starvation.
In the surrounding countryside Beal, in the spring of 1933, reported finding bodies unburied on abandoned fields and in deserted villages.
I have seen dead people who had died naturally, before. But this was from a cause and a definite one. A cause which I was somehow associated with, which I had been supporting. Some bodies were decomposed. Others were fresher. When we opened the doors, huge rats would scamper to their holes and then come out and stare at us. signs were stuck up on gravesIn July 1932, Beal had learned that a third Gastonia convict and fellow exile K. Y. "Red" Hendricks had returned to New York and was facing extradition to North Carolina. In response to his calls for an international campaign on his behalf, Beal was told that nothing was to be done, that Hendricks had "put the Soviet Union in an embarrassing position": American workers would be asking "Is American jail better than living in the Soviet Union?" Recognizing that no open letter from him would get past the Soviet censors, and himself thoroughly disillusioned, Beal determined upon his own return. Early in August 1933, he managed to persuade Kharkiv authorities that he had Moscow's permission to secure an exit visa in order to renew his American passport abroad. He had thought of visiting Leon Trotsky in his Turkish exile, but did not have the funds to secure a visa from the Turkish consul in Odessa. In September he crossed over the border into Latvia.
I LOVE STALIN. BURY HIM HERE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE!
THE COLLECTIVE DIED ON US!
WE TRIED A COLLECTIVE. THIS IS THE RESULT!
On our way back people told us that that village was to be burned.
Testifying to the famine
Beal's account of his Ukrainian experience was first published in June 1935 in Forverts, the Yiddish-language edition of the New York City Jewish socialist daily The Forward. His story corroborated that of the paper's labor editor, Harry Lang, who had himself been to the region. Both proposed a death toll in the millions. According to Beal, when he asked Grigory Petrovsky, Chairman of the Ukrainian SSR, what he was to tell workers at the tractor plant who were saying that "millions of peasants are dying all over Russia", Petrovsky replied: "Tell them nothing!" and that "the glorious future of the Soviet Union will justify" the loss.. Lang cited a high Ukrainian Soviet official confidentially conceding that famine took the lives of six million.National coverage was secured when William Randolph Hearst ordered the editors of his numerous titles to cover the story, drawing not only on the testimony of Beal and of Lang, but also on that of the Welsh freelance journalist Gareth Jones Jones's eyewitness reports from Ukraine had been published in Britain by the Manchester Guardian, but like Beal in the United States he found they were rejected by much of the established and left-wing press. In The New York Times, Walter Duranty dismissed the Hearst-circulated reports of man-made starvation as a politically motivated "scare story".
To better serve Hearst's new policy of opposition to diplomatic recognition of Moscow, in articles written by Thomas Walker the eyewitness accounts were made to appear more current than they were. This allowed Louis Fischer in The Nation to accuse the Hearst press of pure invention. Fischer, although according to Myra Page himself a witness to the famine in 1933, had returned to Ukraine in 1934 and could report that he had seen no evidence of starvation. Like Duranty, he proposed that the whole affair was merely an attempt by Hearst to "spoil Soviet-American relations" as part of "an anti-red campaign".
Beal's former party comrades claimed that, facing prison on his return to the United States, Beal had prostituted himself to this campaign. It is a charge Douglas Tottle repeated decades later in a book that purports to expose the "Ukrainian genocide myth": Beal had sold out for money and hope of a reduced sentence. Beal acknowledged that, in the eyes of Communists and those he described as "their liberal lackeys", having his story placed in the Hearst newspapers "completely blotted out" his record as a strike leader and as a victim of the "Gastonia frame up". But the Hearst papers, he argued, had published a "host of Communist and near-Communist writers" and were "essentially" no more suspect than "other capitalist journals and magazines to which the Stalinists contribute their propaganda". His own ideals, he insisted, had not changed.
Beal's memoir of mill work and labor struggles in the United States, and of life as a foreign worker under Stalin, was published as by Hillman-Curl, New York, in 1937. In Britain it was published as Word From Nowhere: The Story of a Fugitive from Two Worlds by the Right Book Club in 1938. This coincided with an offering in Britain from the Left Book Club: a panorama of the Soviet Union in which Kharkov's new tractors were celebrated for assisting with "the biggest harvest Russia ever had".
Beal and Trotskyism
Beal's memoir concludes with the declaration:Soviet Russia is the grandest fraud in history... But I am as convinced as ever that there is another road to a free and classless humanity, a road which is worth the quest, and which can be found only by minds liberated from the worship of false gods and by spirits strong enough to face the truth in the quest for truth.For Beal this other road to socialism was not Trotskyism. Referring to Beal as "one of the leaders of the workers in America", in an article completed shortly before his assassination in August 1940, Leon Trotsky cited Proletarian Journey. In Beal's description of their solicitous treatment in Moscow, Trotsky found evidence of the grooming of foreign leftists by Stalin's secret operatives. In 1938, the American Trotskyist weekly, Socialist Appeal had given front-page coverage to a campaign to prevent Beal's recommittal in North Carolina.
But Beal's condemnation of "Stalin land" was too sweeping to accommodate Trotsky's insistence that the Soviet Union remained, albeit "degenerated", a workers state. Rather, for the editor of the Socialist Appeal, Max Shachtman, Beal's description of the Soviet party-state bureaucracy as a "new exploiting class" was to be a point of departure in a break with Trotsky. As he moved with his supporters to an avowedly Marxist version of democratic socialism, Shachtman denied that the "bureaucratic collectivism" of the Soviet Union was "in any sense" socialist.
Reflections of Communist labor organizer
Lawrence and the Wobblies
In January 1912, Beal, a fifteen-year-old mill hand, stopped machinery and with his co-workers walked out on his employers in his hometown, Lawrence Massachusetts. The Industrial Workers of the World, the “Wobblies”, had shown that a largely female and immigrant workforce could organize. Beal recalled that, against all expectations, it was the most recent immigrant groups that sustained the strike over the next two bitterly cold winter months: "the Italians, Poles, Syrians and Franco-Belgians".The Wobblies did not shy from confrontation, but they also courted public opinion. In a signature move “Big" Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn arranged the public transport of hundreds of the strikers' hungry children to sympathetic families in New York, New Jersey, and Vermont. When the state's heavy-handed efforts to stop the embarrassing exodus led to Congressional hearings on the working conditions, the mill owners settled. Workers in Lawrence and throughout New England secured raises of up to 20 percent.
Beal signed both with the Wobblies and with Socialist Party of U.S. presidential candidate Eugene Debs, who despite his differences with the syndicalism of the Wobblies' One Big Union, had rallied support for the Lawrence strike. In the midst of the post-World War recession and the Red Scare of 1919–20, Beal tried to revive the local IWW organization by forming a Rank and File Committee of Textile Workers. While this effort at bottom-up organizing was ruthlessly commandeered by the new-formed Communist Party, Beal was drawn to its disciplined militants because they were themselves "workers in the mills". His fellow Socialists he had come to view chiefly as “middle-class intellectuals who loved to theorize about Utopia” and felt they were bringing it about when at every election they voted against the major parties.