Remember, if you please, there were more than a million young people in their ‘teens who were wandering around this Nation of ours, just hoboes. They had no homes; they had no food; they had no jobs. So such a heading has great appeal to them because it holds for the hope that some other form of existence would provide a better life for them, and the inference always being the Soviet Union was doing that. The Soviet Union had solved that problem. Little did the people know how they solved it. And now, of course, there is a great deal of evidence coming into public attention which indicates that many of those young people in the Soviet Union, while some of them certainly did receive education as a way out, others also wound up in prison camps, vast prison camps, enormous prison camps. And we must not forget that that did actually happen.
Here these pamphlets try to present the idea that the children in the Soviet Union live in a paradise. And at that time there was no contravening or contradicting evidence to change anyone’s knowledge about it. Today I think there is.
Mr. Tavenner. Apparently the Communist Party did not lose any opportunities it had to promote its own objectives.
Mr. Dennett. That certainly is true.
Mr. Tavenner. Will you tell the committee, please, the circumstances under which you were transferred away from Bellingham.
Mr. Dennett. Yes.
I referred to Mr. Alex Noral as the district organizer at the time I came into the district. He was fresh from the Soviet Union, and it was presumed that he would give the most astute leadership because he had spent considerable time in the Lenin School in Moscow between 1928 and 1931. However, Mr. Noral’s attitude and methods of work were so arbitrary that the average person could not stand them, not even the most devoted Communists here. And he ran into political difficulties with them.
Reports of these difficulties reached the central committee in New York City, and they decided that Mr. Noral had to have some help. So they sent some more people out here to help him.
Mr. Tavenner. Do you mean Communist Party functionaries were sent from New York to this area?
Mr. Dennett. Communist Party functionaries, people who fall into the category of professional revolutionists, people who devote their lives and dedicate themselves to the Communist cause and do as they are told without question.