Mr. Tavenner. What was your party name?
Mr. Dennett. Victor Haines, H-a-i-n-e-s.
Mr. Tavenner. Did you have anything to do with the selection of it, or was it selected for you?
Mr. Dennett. Yes; I had something to do with selecting it. When they told me that I had to choose a party name I asked for help on it, and the only help they could offer was to use the name of J. P. Morgan or John D. Rockefeller or Henry Ford or something like that. They were always suggesting the most prominent capitalists as the party pseudonym.
Mr. Tavenner. Will you tell the committee, please, what your first activity was in the Communist Party after becoming a member?
Mr. Dennett. I believe that I was first assigned to carry on this classwork in Portland, to keep this school going that was started. But that didn’t last very long because at that time the district organizer of the party was a man by the name of Alex Noral, who was here in Seattle.
And Noral was troubled because they were unable to get someone to fill the function of a district agitprop director here in Seattle. So he was asking Fred Walker to come to Seattle to be the agitprop director because Fred Walker had organized such a successful school in Portland and had done such splendid work which met with the district approval.
Walker, however, had personal reasons for not wanting to leave Portland. So he requested me to accept the assignment to Seattle. And I was perplexed as to what to do. I was in the middle of a school teaching year, but I was becoming more convinced all the time that there was no future in teaching—at least the way I wanted to do it. So I accepted, under a great deal of pressure, the assignment to come to Seattle. And that was, I say, under a great deal of pressure, too, because the way I was approached on it was that “Well, now you are a member of the party. You do what the party tells you to do, and you go where the party wants you to “go.”
Mr. Moulder. May I interrupt at that point before you start on your Seattle testimony?
I am curious to know, during that period of time when there were no laws prohibiting membership in the Communist Party, why there was direction that you operate underground or under false names?