Do you solemnly swear to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help you God?
Mr. O’Connell. I do.
Mr. Tavenner. Mr. O’Connell, I referred to the proposal sponsored by the Communist Party in the State of Washington in 1936 for the enactment of a law establishing production-for-use initiative as it was called.
Mr. O’Connell. That was stolen from Upton Sinclair’s legislation.
Mr. Tavenner. And possibly also from the Soviet Union.
Mr. O’Connell. I don’t propose to speak for the Soviet Union.
Mr. Tavenner. Do you propose to speak for Mr. Upton Sinclair?
Mr. O’Connell. I knew Mr. Sinclair quite well and he used to contribute to my campaign and I had some opportunity to see his campaign in California.
Mr. Tavenner. Eugene V. Dennett described a convention of the Washington Commonwealth Federation, held in April 1936 in Everett, Wash., and the part that the Communist Party played in that convention. His testimony relating to this particular matter is as follows:
There was another matter which arose as a serious issue in that convention and it concerned a proposal for an initiative measure which became known as the production-for-use initiative. Many people, because of the Communist Party influence in the unemployed days, were quite concerned and alarmed over the problem of unemployment, insecurity, possible impoverishment, et cetera. All the consequences of economic dislocation. They had read many of the so-called utopian pieces of literature such as Bellamy’s Looking Backward and other documents of the kind. They had also read Mr. Upton Sinclair’s Program in California. They were somewhat acquainted with the propaganda of the Soviet Union to the effect that production for use was the solution to the problems of capitalist lack of planning. In other words, planned economy.
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.
Question. Now, at that point describe a little more fully what production for use meant in a practical sense.
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 we 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. The person to whom I refer is Anna Louise Strong, who had just come from the Soviet Union, extended greetings to the convention and otherwise gave a very enlightening report on her travels and won wide acclaim for that effort.
Question. Did she on the floor of the convention address herself to the problem of production for use?
Mr. Dennett. She did not. Not at that moment. She spoke only in general terms about the referring to it in a complimentary way and hoping for success, but at that moment she did not know very much about what was in that document. However, we felt that she, coming from the Soviet Union with fresh knowledge, might know quite a lot about it and might be able to assist us in revising the document so that it would be possible to satisfy us that it was in fact a step in the right direction of a cooperative commonwealth. So she consented very graciously to take the document and work on it overnight. She did exactly that and we read it the next morning and much to our surprise she had moved the emphasis in the control even more in the direction of top control and less in the direction of allowing the members or the organization to have anything to say about it, which was just the reverse of the trend that we had hoped for.
Consequently we began to ask ourselves, that is, the Communists asked themselves, if this is the end result of an effort to draw up an initiative maybe it would be smarter politically for us to see that the measure died a-borning. Consequently we came to the conclusion that it was impossible to draw up an initiative measure which would be adequate and which would answer our propaganda needs and our desires to satisfy us that it was in harmony with our program. So we embarked upon a campaign in the course of the election.
Question. Was this a campaign to pass the proposed bill or to defeat it?
Mr. Dennett. We all went out presumably to win support, to get the measure adopted. That is, it was an initiative measure and it was before the voters. The voters were to cast a vote “yes” or “no” on this initiative. The Communist Party found itself in that predicament.
We were committed to support the measure but we were determined to bring about its defeat. Consequently, we campaigned far and wide all over the State of Washington explaining the measure in such a way as to convince the people that they should not vote for it. At the same time we represented ourselves as campaigning for the measure and we did it so successfully that the measure was defeated. If we had not have done it I am afraid it would have been adopted.