I listened to James Cannon's fighting speeches for a legal Communist party in America. Cannon's manner was different from Bill Haywood's or Foster's. He had all the magnetism, the shrewdness, the punch, the bag of tricks of the typical American politician, but here he used them in a radical way. I wondered about him. If he had entered Democratic or Republican politics, there was no barrier I could see that could stop him from punching his way straight through to the front ranks.
I think Trotsky was the first of the big Russians to be convinced that there should be a legal Communist party in America, then Rakovsky and finally Zinoviev, a little reluctantly. Bukharin was for the illegal group. He said: "Remember what Jack London has told us about the terror and secret organization in America in his Iron Heel." That was so rare that I had to smile. While Cannon was informing the Russians about actual conditions in America, Bukharin was visualizing the America of Jack London's Iron Heel. Bukharin always did make me think of that line about some men having greatness thrust upon them. I believe that Lenin said of Bukharin, as Frank Harris said of H.G. Wells, that he could not think. Yet Bukharin was the author of the A B C of Communism, which once had a big vogue among the radicals.
At last even I was asked my opinion of an illegal Communist party in America. I tried to get excused, saying that as I was not an official delegate or a politician, but merely a poet, I didn't think my opinion was worth while. But as my colleague the mulatto was for the illegal party, I suppose they needed a foil. So then I said that although I had no experience of the actual conditions of social life in Czarist Russia, I believed there was no comparison between them and American conditions today. There were certain democratic privileges such as a limited freedom of the press and a limited right of free speech that our governing classes had had to concede because they were the necessary ingredients of their own system of society. And American radicals could generally carry on open propaganda under those democratic privileges. Our Upton Sinclairs, Eugene Debs's, Max Eastmans and Mother Jones's might be prosecuted and imprisoned for a specific offense against the law, but they were not banished for their radical ideas to an American Siberia. And I said I thought that the only place where illegal and secret radical propaganda was necessary was among the Negroes of the South.
What I said about the Negroes of the South was more important than I imagined, and precipitated the Negro question. The Negro question came under the division of the Eastern Bureau, of which Sen Katayama was an active official. Because of his American experience and his education among Negroes, Sen Katayama was important as a kind of arbiter between black and white on the Negro question. It was an unforgettable experience to watch Katayama in conference. He was like a little brown bulldog with his jaws clamped on an object that he wouldn't let go. He apparently forgot all about nice human relationships in conference. Sen Katayama had no regard for the feelings of the white American comrades, when the Negro question came up, and boldly told them so. He said that though they called themselves Communists, many of them were unconsciously prejudiced against Negroes because of their background. He told them that really to understand Negroes they needed to be educated about and among Negroes as he had been.
Think not that it was just a revolutionary picnic and love feast in Moscow in the fifth year of Lenin! One of the American delegates was a southerner or of southern extraction. An important Bolshevik facetiously suggested to him that to untangle the Negro problem, black and white should intermarry. "Good God!" said the American, "if Jesus Christ came down from Heaven and said that in the South, he would be lynched." The Bolshevik said: "Jesus Christ wouldn't dare, but Lenin would."
Also I remember Walton Newbold who was the first Communist candidate elected to the British House of Commons. Saklatvala, the Indian Parsee, had announced himself a Communist only after he had been elected as an independent, but Walton Newbold was the first candidate of the British Communist Party. Just after his election to Parliament Newbold came to Moscow, while the Fourth Congress of International Communism was in session. For any reader who might not understand why a Communist member of the British Parliament should go to Moscow, I may explain that by the parallel of a cardinal going to Rome after receiving his hat. It was a big day for the little insignificant delegation of British Communists when Newbold arrived in Moscow. Of that triumphant arrival, one incident sticks more in my memory. I was informed that a member of the Chinese Young Communists, who was attending the Congress, met Newbold in the lobby of the Lux Hotel. He went up to Comrade Newbold to congratulate him and began: "Comrade Newbold—"
"Hello, Chink," Newbold cut in.
"But Comrade Newbold, I am not a Chink."
"Who told you that you weren't?" said Comrade Newbold as he turned away.