Mr. Tavenner. I find this following paragraph on the same page under the title “Defend Soviet Union”:
The Trade Union Unity League especially organizes and educates the masses to fight in defense of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union is the stronghold of the world’s working class. It is the cause of the workers in all countries. The overthrow of the Soviet Union by the capitalists would mean not only the slaughter of tens of thousands of Russian workers but would mark the beginning of the worst period of reaction internationally that the world has ever known. It would lead to widespread Fascist terrorism, and wholesale destruction of workers’ economic, political, and cultural organizations and the wiping out of conditions won by the workers through a century of sacrifice and struggle. It would throw back for decades the development of the world labor movement.
The workers must fight to the end in defense of the Soviet Union.
Is that paragraph in accord with what you understood at the time to be the objectives of the Trade Union Unity League?
Mr. Dennett. Well, shortly after my induction into the Communist Party I, as recounted earlier this morning, became the district agitprop director. In that position at that time we had the special privilege of receiving the first issues of all new pamphlets or magazines or anything like that that were issued. At that time there came into my possession a document with the title “The 21 Conditions for Affiliation With the Communist International,” and among those conditions these points that are set forth in this document you have just read cover some of those conditions.
Mr. Tavenner. In other words, was there a strict linking together through this organization and through the action of the Comintern, of the control of the Communist Party in this country by the international organization?
Mr. Dennett. I think that has to be acknowledged by anyone who is familiar with the record at all.
However, there is one little addendum that should be inserted at this point, that at a later point in the history of the Communist Party in the United States—I believe it was about the time the Voorhis Act was passed—under the leadership of Earl Browder the Communist Party in the United States took steps by formal resolution adopted at convention to completely disassociate itself legally from any of this previous material. They attempted to satisfy and comply with the provisions of the Voorhis Act.
And in their effort to do so they adopted a resolution in which they repudiated all of this political statement and line that we are now talking about. That was a formal act.
Mr. Tavenner. There was considerable testimony before this committee at the time it attempted to interrogate Max Granich and his wife, who were connected with a news facility which transmits from Europe to this country decisions of the Communist Party on an international level, and we heard a number of witnesses, including Louis Budenz, who was connected with the Daily Worker.
The testimony is very clear that that action you have spoken of was a device, not in good faith a severance or a disavowal of what had happened before. But it was a device, to keep the Communist Party from being liable under provisions of the Voorhis Act to which you have referred, of representing a foreign country.