Communist People’s World Traces Its 46 Years : Paper’s Devotees Mix Causes, Nostalgia

It was a proper banquet for a newspaper that calls itself “The voice of the left for over 40 years.”

Packets of Nicaraguan coffee were for sale in solidarity with the Sandinista Revolution. Books on topics ranging from Karl Marx to nuclear war were on display. Many of the guests wore red ribbons symbolizing their support of anti-apartheid movements. Child care was provided.

The event, held Saturday at the Biltmore downtown, was the annual Southern California fund-raising banquet for the People’s World, a small but avidly read tabloid that has kept tabs on leftist and liberal movements since 1938.

Although the paper has always been run by members of the Communist Party USA, few at the banquet were party members. Most would call themselves progressives or activists in one of many causes that the People’s World has championed over the last 46 years.

“Why do they come?” asked Executive Editor Carl Bloice. “They think it serves a useful purpose. They appreciate the fact that the People’s World has covered their marches, their meetings, their issues, when no one else would.”

Said one young woman: “We may not all be in the same struggle, but we all know what it is to struggle. The People’s World understands that.”

Today, in perhaps the most conservative period in U.S. history since the 1950s, the People’s World continues to provide a forum for liberals and leftists that they feel they cannot find elsewhere.

“I will speak wherever I can to bring my message,” said keynote speaker Richard Hatcher, mayor of Gary, Ind. As director of TransAfrica, an anti-apartheid lobbying group, his topic was South Africa. But the principal note he sounded was for unity among all liberals and progressives.

“There is discouragement among people who have been in the struggle for a very long time--many of our advances seem to be slipping away,” he said.

“Where do we go from here?” he asked. “We’re not going to agree on everything. But we must coalesce around those things we do agree on: peace, justice and equality of opportunity. The ‘me’ generation must become the ‘we’ generation.”

Even before the People’s World was born, a broad coalition that included the Communist Party had come together to fight unemployment in the Depression and rising European fascism.

“We were marching in New York, in Washington, in those days.” said Sadie Doroshkin, 84, a former business manager of the People’s World.

“Remember March 6, 1930?” she asked a companion at the banquet table. “Must have been 110,000 people in Union Square in New York. What we were demonstrating for--unemployment insurance, Social Security, relief--people almost take for granted now.”

The first People’s World was published in the Bay Area on Jan. 1, 1938. It carried pages of welcoming messages from labor unions, small businessmen and public officials, including Sam Yorty, then a state assemblyman, who said he was happy to see a paper to “present labor’s side of important events.”

That first edition carried a banner headline that read, “FDR Brands ‘Malefactors of Wealth.’ ” One front page story proclaimed that, while 1937 had been a miserable year for American workers, Soviet citizens were “celebrating a year crowded with tremendous achievements” because they had “forever abolished capitalism.”

“It was no secret that the Communists launched the paper . . . and retained control over it,” wrote Al Richmond, one of the paper’s original staff members and for years its editor, in his 1975 book entitled “Long View of the Left.”

Yet, he added: “I recall unions that bought subscriptions for their entire executive board. The longshoremen’s local threw a Labor Day ball for the paper’s benefit, the warehousemen’s local sponsored a raffle, a conference on the paper attracted official delegates from a score of unions.”

The paper was a daily then, full of biting social commentary, political cartoons, and even a cooking section that provided inexpensive, working-class recipes such as curried frankfurter casserole. A sports story predicted (accurately) that Stub Allison’s UC Berkeley Bears would defeat Alabama’s Crimson Tide in the Rose Bowl. A political footnote to the story lamented that many fans were unable to attend because tickets cost $4.50 and up.

Activists and Partisans

Singer Woodie Guthrie was one of its early columnists. Its reporters, then as today, were activists and open partisans of the events they covered.

In 1942, a People’s World reporter named Alice Greenfield McGrath chaired a defense committee for 17 young Chicanos who had been arrested for the infamous “Sleepy Lagoon” murders, which provided the inspiration for the 1978 play called “Zoot Suit.” The 17 ultimately were acquitted.

The People’s World described the case as a “racist anti-Chicano frame-up.” Mainstream papers openly cheered on police, sailors and vigilantes who began attacking Chicanos at random in zoot suit riots that followed the court case.

After World War II, the Cold War took its toll on both the PW (as the paper had come to be called), and on its readership. Virtually the entire top leadership of the Communist Party USA, including PW editors, were convicted under the Smith Act of conspiring to violently overthrow the U.S. government.

Reporters from the People’s World were barred from the press galleries of the California Assembly and Senate in 1951, and from the Los Angeles City Council in 1953.

“The City Council had invited in some Marines who had just come back from Korea,” recalled reporter Don Wheeldin, now 70, in an interview. “This one councilman stood up and spoke of these enemy forces who were seeking to destroy us. Then, suddenly he turned and pointed to me and said: ‘Here sits, in our very midst, one of their agents who is seeking to destroy us!’

“I just sat there. I had had a seat there for a long time. I think I was the only black in the chambers at the time, and I thought there were tones of racism as well. He whipped up a kind of lynching atmosphere.” He was escorted out of the chambers and his paper was barred from returning, a ban that eroded after the McCarthy era.

Throughout the period, the newspaper office on Broadway in Los Angeles was stocked with baseball bats in case anyone tried to carry out the countless threats the paper had received, Wheeldin said.

The Supreme Court eventually overturned the convictions of several Communists in a landmark decision that held they had been wrongly convicted for believing in communism, not for acting to overthrow the U.S. government. But the party never recuperated from McCarthyism.

Becomes a Weekly

Neither did the paper. In 1957, with a circulation of only a few thousand, the Daily People’s World was forced to become a weekly.

“We were always sweating it out,” recalled Sam Kushner, a veteran Chicago labor organizer, who became director of the Southern California office of the People’s World in 1961 and now has a weekly labor program on radio station KPFK.

“I went to some events like City Council meetings just so people could see that Communists were really people. But we made an impact in certain fields.” One of those fields was the farm worker organizing struggles of the 1960s and ‘70s.

“The People’s World was read by a lot of different people, including liberals in the Democratic Party who were natural allies of the farm workers,” Kushner said. “So, when the farm workers went to them for support, they knew what their cause was all about.”

Focus on Issues

To judge by the paper’s pages, Communist Party doctrine seems less important to People’s World staffers and readers than do issues of poverty, jobs and peace that are concerns in the United States. The paper also seeks out contributors of all liberal political views.

Asked what the Communist Party, which underwrites the paper’s deficit, gains from its publication, Bloice said: “Well, say, when we cover, say plant closings, we always distribute the paper at plant gates and we usually get a few members,” Bloice said.

Several veteran reporters, including Kushner, Wheeldin and Richmond, left the party, and the paper, over Soviet policies, such as the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In their stead, the paper attracted new writers such as Rosalio Munoz, 38, the Southern California associate editor.

Munoz, once student body president of UCLA, joined the paper four years ago after more than a decade of community organizing in the Latino communities.

‘Paper of Struggle’

“I go into a story as an organizer, an activist,” he said in an interview. “I want to help change things. We are a paper of struggle, the working people’s struggle for progress.”

Added Anthony Thigpenn, director of a coalition called Jobs With Peace that successfully passed Proposition X, which requires the City of Los Angeles to annually compute how much of city residents’ taxes go for military expenditures and distribute its findings:

“I appreciate People’s World even if I don’t read it all the time. People became involved in our campaign because they read about us in the People’s World. It is a forum for many people who want change--all kinds of change.”