Mr. Velde. Was there any secrecy involved, especially at that time?
Mr. Dennett. No; there was no secrecy in that communication. As a matter of fact, they took parallel measures to see that somebody in Governor Olson’s staff also sent word to Howard Costigan directly. He also received the word. So that there was parallel information. At least we did make that concession to Costigan, that he would have official information about it.
Mr. Tavenner. Did the rank-and-file membership of the Washington Commonwealth Federation know of the Communist Party manipulations which you have just described?
Mr. Dennett. I am quite sure that most of them did not, although the behavior of many of the Democratic Party leaders at that convention would lead me to believe that they suspected it, because they fought us so bitterly and so hard.
Mr. Tavenner. Proceed, please.
Mr. Dennett. The story on the production-for-use initiative is simply this:
Because there was such a popular demand for some change in the economic situation to assure continued production and a cooperative effort, many people tried to translate an ideal of a cooperative commonwealth into some form of legislative effort. This resulted in many conferences and the calling in of legal talent to try to draft a measure which would be legal and which would satisfy the ambitions of the people to have the so-called dream of a cooperative commonwealth organization.
Mr. Tavenner. Describe in a practical sense what production-for-use meant?
Mr. Dennett. I wish I could satisfy you completely on that point because that is one of the problems we ran into in trying to draw up this initiative measure.
We could never satisfy ourselves that we had it satisfactorily organized. However, the staff who worked on it worked long and hard and finally produced a measure which was known as the production-for-use initiative. It was ready for presentation to that convention. However, some of us in the Communist Party, while we agreed that such a measure was a good propaganda weapon and felt that it was an excellent means of popularizing the ideas which we understood and claimed were the basis of the operation of the economy in the Soviet Union, we were startled when we read the document and found that it sounded a little bit more like the Fascist corporate state that the Italian leader Mussolini had established. We became so alarmed about it, and were so perplexed that we asked a very world-famous person, who happened to be a guest of the convention, what this person thought about it.